Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: LECTURE m THE FEEDING OF NORMAL INFANTS-THE PROPRIETARY FOODS-PREMATURE INFANTS THE FEEDING OF NORMAL INFANTS I am going to take up today the feeding of normal babies and children, then a discussion of the various proprietary foods, showing their advantages and disadvantages. After that, if there is time, I shall discuss the care and feeding of premature infants. Breast milk contains 4 percent fat, 7 percent sugar, 1.6 percent protein—a food relatively rich in fat and sugar and poor in protein. It is reasonable to suppose that as this is the type of food nature intended for infants, the best artificial food for them is a food which somewhat approximates breast milk in its composition, and in which, especially, the proportion of one element to another is somewhat the same as it is in breast milk. We do not try to exactly imitate breast milk, however. Rather do we try to fit the milk to the digestive capacity of the individual baby, determining this capacity by watching the baby's symptoms, its weight, and by carefully examining its stools. The feeding of any baby is more or less experimental for the first few feedings. The digestive capacity of average babies of similar size, age, and weight is known; but the digestion of any particular baby is at first an unknown quantity, until the physician becomes better acquainted with it, so the baby is given a milk which it ought to be able to take, and if it cannot digest that, the food has to be altered to suit the capacity of its digestion. It is very important in all artificial feeding to fit the food to the baby. The baby, and not rules and tables, ought to be followed in artificial feeding. Remember the individual baby and certain broad general principles which apply to all babies. The feeding of sick babies is a d...