Fraternity-Testvériség, 1963 (40. évfolyam, 1-12. szám)
1963-10-01 / 10. szám
FRATERNITY 9 BABY LORE AND LOGIC Proud parents back in the middle ages greased their new born children with lard. They thought it brought good luck. Other parents let their kids’ fingernails grow until the children had reached their first birthday. It was feared that an infant with short fingernails would grow up to be a thief. Of course, not all parents went as far as the Eskimos, who tossed their children into the churning sea when they wouldn’t eat. But the history of raising kids is full of quaint old practices that date back to the time when old wives’ tales were the “Doctor Spock” of every mother. Take the matter of feeding baby with a bottle. They tried it in Europe as long as 2,000 years ago. Sometimes glass and porcelain bottles were used, but more often the milk container was a hollow cow’s horn with a small hole drilled in the pointed end. Pity the poor infant who was fed with these “baby bottles”. Milk flowed too rapidly from them, often spilling over the baby’s cheeks or running so rapidly down his throat that he’d choke or gag. Although this kind of bottle feeding made life miserable for European babies, they were still better off than their counterparts in India. Hindu doctors were advising parents to let their offspring lick a mixture of honey, butter, the leaves of plants and gold dust from the fingers of their attendants. Back in Europe, some medieval thinker with a soft spot for cuddly kids finally invented a crude “nipple” made of chamois cloth. The cloth prevented the milk from pouring rapidly out of cow’s horn bottles, but still absorbed some of the liquid. By sucking on the chamois, a child could get some nourishment. This absorbent “nipple” was the hottest idea in the medieval nursery, and before long clever inventors were making similar devices out of leather, linen and sponge. Though handy, all of these crude nipples were dangerous. Nobody knew about sterilizing things in those days, and bottle-fed babies often died because of the unsanitary way in which they were nursed. Many superstitious medieval mamas attributed the loss of their bottle- fed children to the fact that the infants had seen themselves in a mirror before the age of four months — a jinx believed sure to cause either rickets or death. Others thought death had been caused by Friday the 13th labor pains, or by an unlucky horoscope. Baby bottles that can be sterilized are a comparatively new wrinkle in child care. The first one was patented only 118 years ago by Elijah Pratt, an American inventor. Pratt’s invention ran into trouble. Its nipple had a terrible taste and smell. Mothers avoided using it as much as they avoided tickling their babies’ feet — which they still believed would cause stammering in later years.
