The best food for the new-born baby is human mother’s milk and, if possible, the mother should feed the baby up to the seventh or eighth month. If this time happens to fall in the summer months, it is best not to wean the baby even then.
Weaning is a gradual process, and in some instances supplementary feeding, which is partial weaning, may have to be given from the first. The question of whether to do this or not is one that calls for medical judgment, and is based largely on the question of increase in weight.
We are fortunate today in that medical ingenuity has been able to devise so many different kinds of artificial foods. Mother’s milk differs considerably from cow’s milk, especially in the form which the fat takes, but there is on the market available a product which is a very close imitation in all ways of mother’s milk. This is a so-called synthetic milk. The basis of the mixture is cow’s milk, to which has been added potassium salt and lactose, and special fat in the pro-portion of 4 per cent incorporated by homogenization. The fat is a mixture of vegetable and animal fats with cod liver oil, having a melting point and chemical constants approximating those of the fat of human milk.