STARVATION IN THE NURSERY.

Wairarapa Daily Times, Volume 2, Issue 75, 3 February 1879, Page 2

STARVATION IN THE NURSERY.

In.an article headed "Starvation in the Nursery," the Lancet calls attention to what it says is a fact established by daily experience; that large numbers of persons occupying decent positions in society systematically starve their children in respect of that article of food which is the most essential to their nutrition. Even to very .young and fast-growing children they give cocoa with water, and not always oven'a suspicion of milk, corn flour with water just clouded with milk, tea, oatmeal baked flour, all sorts of materials, indeed, as vehicles of milk, but so very lightly laden with it that the term is a sham. The consequence of this misplaced economy is that there arethousahnds of households in which the' children are pale, slight, and unwholesome-looking, and, as their parents say in something like tones of remonstrance, " always delicate." Ignorance, no doubt, is often the cause. The parents do not know that, supposing.there were no other reason, their wisesteconomy is to let their growing young ones have their unstinted fill of milk, even though the dairyman's bill should come to nearly as much as the wine-merchant's in the course of the week. But in many cases (the medical paper is of opinion) the stint is a simple, meanness, a pitiful economy in respect of that which, it is supposed, will not be open to the criticism of observant friends.