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. [Footnote:  Women eat bread, vegetables, and dairy produce; female dogs and cats do the same; the she-wolves eat grass.  This supplies vegetable juices to their milk.  There are still those species which are unable to eat anything but flesh, if such there are, which I very much doubt.] 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. [Footnote:  Although the juices which nourish us are liquid, they must be extracted from solids.  A hard-working man who ate nothing but soup would soon waste away.  He would be far better fed on milk, just because it curdles.] 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.