Confessions & Emile. Jean-Jacques Rousseau
is ill-done for them, except what they do themselves, and they do next to nothing. When a nurse must be selected the choice is left to the doctor. What happens? The best nurse is the one who offers the highest bribe. I shall not consult the doctor about Emile's nurse, I shall take care to choose her myself. I may not argue about it so elegantly as the surgeon, but I shall be more reliable, I shall be less deceived by my zeal than the doctor by his greed.
There is no mystery about this choice; its rules are well known, but I think we ought probably to pay more attention to the age of the milk as well as its quality. The first milk is watery, it must be almost an aperient, to purge the remains of the meconium curdled in the bowels of the new-born child. Little by little the milk thickens and supplies more solid food as the child is able to digest it. It is surely not without cause that nature changes the milk in the female of every species according to the age of the offspring.
Thus a new-born child requires a nurse who has recently become mother. There is, I know, a difficulty here, but as soon as we leave the path of nature there are difficulties in the way of all well-doing. The wrong course is the only right one under the circumstances, so we take it.
The nurse must be healthy alike in disposition and in body. The violence of the passions as well as the humours may spoil her milk. Moreover, to consider the body only is to keep only half our aim in view. The milk may be good and the nurse bad; a good character is as necessary as a good constitution. If you choose a vicious person, I do not say her foster-child will acquire her vices, but he will suffer for them. Ought she not to bestow on him day by day, along with her milk, a care which calls for zeal, patience, gentleness, and cleanliness. If she is intemperate and greedy her milk will soon be spoilt; if she is careless and hasty what will become of a poor little wretch left to her mercy, and unable either to protect himself or to complain. The wicked are never good for anything.
The choice is all the more important because her foster-child should have no other guardian, just as he should have no teacher but his tutor. This was the custom of the ancients, who talked less but acted more wisely than we. The nurse never left her foster-daughter; this is why the nurse is the confidante in most of their plays. A child who passes through many hands in turn, can never be well brought up.
At every change he makes a secret comparison, which continually tends to lessen his respect for those who control him, and with it their authority over him. If once he thinks there are grown-up people with no more sense than children the authority of age is destroyed and his education is ruined. A child should know no betters but its father and mother, or failing them its foster-mother and its tutor, and even this is one too many, but this division is inevitable, and the best that can be done in the way of remedy is that the man and woman who control him shall be so well agreed with regard to him that they seem like one.
The nurse must live rather more comfortably, she must have rather more substantial food, but her whole way of living must not be altered, for a sudden change, even a change for the better, is dangerous to health, and since her usual way of life has made her healthy and strong, why change it?
Country women eat less meat and more vegetables than towns-women, and this vegetarian diet seems favourable rather than otherwise to themselves and their children. When they take nurslings from the upper classes they eat meat and broth with the idea that they will form better chyle and supply more milk. I do not hold with this at all, and experience is on my side, for we do not find children fed in this way less liable to colic and worms.
That need not surprise us, for decaying animal matter swarms with worms, but this is not the case with vegetable matter.8 Milk, although manufactured in the body of an animal, is a vegetable substance; this is shown by analysis; it readily turns acid, and far from showing traces of any volatile alkali like animal matter, it gives a neutral salt like plants.
The milk of herbivorous creatures is sweeter and more wholesome than the milk of the carnivorous; formed of a substance similar to its own, it keeps its goodness and becomes less liable to putrifaction. If quantity is considered, it is well known that farinaceous foods produce more blood than meat, so they ought to yield more milk. If a child were not weaned too soon, and if it were fed on vegetarian food, and its foster-mother were a vegetarian, I do not think it would be troubled with worms.
Milk derived from vegetable foods may perhaps be more liable to go sour, but I am far from considering sour milk an unwholesome food; whole nations have no other food and are none the worse, and all the array of absorbents seems to me mere humbug. There are constitutions which do not thrive on milk, others can take it without absorbents. People are afraid of the milk separating or curdling; that is absurd, for we know that milk always curdles in the stomach. This is how it becomes sufficiently solid to nourish children and young animals; if it did not curdle it would merely pass away without feeding them.9 In vain you dilute milk and use absorbents; whoever swallows milk digests cheese, this rule is without exception; rennet is made from a calf's stomach.
Instead of changing the nurse's usual diet, I think it would be enough to give food in larger quantities and better of its kind. It is not the nature of the food that makes a vegetable diet indigestible, but the flavouring that makes it unwholesome. Reform your cookery, use neither butter nor oil for frying. Butter, salt, and milk should never be cooked. Let your vegetables be cooked in water and only seasoned when they come to table. The vegetable diet, far from disturbing the nurse, will give her a plentiful supply of milk.10 If a vegetable diet is best for the child, how can meat food be best for his nurse? The things are contradictory.
Fresh air affects children's constitutions, particularly in early years. It enters every pore of a soft and tender skin, it has a powerful effect on their young bodies. Its effects can never be destroyed. So I should not agree with those who take a country woman from her village and shut her up in one room in a town and her nursling with her. I would rather send him to breathe the fresh air of the country than the foul air of the town. He will take his new mother's position, will live in her cottage, where his tutor will follow him. The reader will bear in mind that this tutor is not a paid servant, but the father's friend. But if this friend cannot be found, if this transfer is not easy, if none of my advice can be followed, you will say to me, "What shall I do instead?" I have told you already—"Do what you are doing;" no advice is needed there.
Men are not made to be crowded together in ant-hills, but scattered over the earth to till it. The more they are massed together, the more corrupt they become. Disease and vice are the sure results of over-crowded cities. Of all creatures man is least fitted to live in herds. Huddled together like sheep, men would very soon die. Man's breath is fatal to his fellows. This is literally as well as figuratively true.
Men are devoured by our towns. In a few generations the race dies out or becomes degenerate; it needs renewal, and it is always renewed from the country. Send your children to renew themselves, so to speak, send them to regain in the open fields the strength lost in the foul air of our crowded cities. Women hurry home that their children may be born in the town; they ought to do just the opposite, especially those who mean to nurse their own children. They would lose less than they think, and in more natural surroundings the pleasures associated by nature with maternal duties would soon destroy the taste for other delights.
The new-born infant is first bathed in warm water to which a little wine is usually added. I think the wine might be dispensed with. As nature does not produce fermented liquors, it is not likely that they are of much value to her creatures.
In the same way it is unnecessary to take the precaution of heating the water; in fact among many races the new-born infants are bathed with no more ado in rivers or in the sea. Our children, made tender before birth by the softness of their parents, come into the world with a constitution already enfeebled, which cannot be at once exposed to all the trials required to restore it to health. Little by little they must be restored to their natural vigour. Begin then by following this custom, and leave it off gradually. Wash your children often, their dirty ways show the need of this. If they are only wiped their skin is injured; but as they grow stronger gradually reduce