because
only thus can we come to a decision on the question whether the nursing
mother owes the taking of alcohol as a duty to her child. She may be a
teetotaler; she may fear to take alcohol; and she may be authoritatively
told that it is her duty to do so because the quality of her milk will
be improved. In such a case she may yield, though often with a wry face;
and thus we have the frequent beginning of disasters to which there is
no end.

The truth is that the medical profession has long erred in this respect.
Judgment has gone by superficials. Undoubtedly there is a greater bulk
of milk when stout and porter are taken. But everyone knows that
ordinary household milk may come from the cow or from the pump. The
question is not how much bulk is there, but what does the bulk consist
of? Definite chemical evidence, which may be repeated a thousand times,
and which is allowed to go unchallenged by the vast host of doctors who
are prescribing alcohol for nursing mothers all over the world, shows us
that its influence is to increase the bulk of the milk while reducing
the amount of its nutritive constituents, and adding to them one which
is poisonous. The increase of bulk is easy to explain. Alcohol is
exceedingly avid of water. Thus the common experience that alcoholic
liquors tend to increase the desire for liquid can readily be explained.
Alcohol, leaving the blood, tends to withdraw with itself, if it can, a
quantity of water. These two, in the milk, between them maintain the
added bulk on account of which alcoholic liquors are so widely ordered
for and drunk by nursing mothers throughout the civilized world. The
infant mortality is thus contributed to, and many women are urged and
deceived by their love for their children into a practice which achieves
their own ruin. Doctors look back a hundred years or so and observe the
amazing practices of their predecessors. They have record of
prescriptions and treatments which were ridiculous or disgusting or
trivial or painful; they have abundant record of practices which were
deadly, and for which any medical man at the present day might be called
upon to pay heavy damages or indicted for manslaughter. Yet in the
matter of the indiscriminate and ignorant employment of alcohol, in
defiance of overwhelmingly proved facts which will not be challenged by
any of those whom this criticism hits and who will virulently resent it
and decry its author, doctors of the present day are a