By Joseph Brennemann, Ph.B., M.D., Department of Pediatrics, Northwestern University Medical School

The striking thing about the newborn infant is its utter helplessness and lack of development as compared with the young of other mammals. This makes it peculiarly delicate and easily influenced unfavorably by its new environment. It is still inherently a part of its mother, for it is still dependent upon her for the only food that can safely meet its primitive needs. With this, if properly given, it will almost invariably flourish and grow at an enormous rate. If denied this natural food, it will rarely thrive as luxuriantly on any artificial food as it will on the breast. It is largely this poor adaptation to a foreign food, that is furthermore often very improperly given by the mother, which accounts for a mortality during the first year of life, that is the most appalling fact confronting us in medicine. Nearly one fourth of the civilized human race dies during the first year of life, a mortality nearly sixty times that of the fifteenth year, and only equaled again as we approach the eighty-fifth year. Directly or indirectly, the great majority of these deaths is due to nutritional disturbances that could, in a great measure, be prevented if these babies were properly nursed at the breast or were carefully fed on artificial food. In this and the succeeding chapter it will be our task to consider the cause, the prevention, and the remedy of this deplorable condition.