The Family Nurse (1837)
AUTHOR: Child, Lydia Maria
https://archive.org/details/familynurseorcom00chilrich/page/n3/mode/2up
---. Gift Book for Young Ladies
---. The Home-book of Life and Health
---. The Laws of Health
---. The Mother in Her Family
---. The Young House-keeper, or, Thoughts on Food and Cookery
---. The Young Mother
---. The Young Woman's Book of Health
Beecher, Catharine Esther. A Treatise on Domestic Economy
---. Woman's Profession as Mother and Educator
Beecher, Catherine and Harriet Beecher Stowe. The American Woman’s Home
Child, Lydia Maria. The Mother’s Book
Dodds, Susanna Way. “Curing by Hygiene”
---. Race Culture
Fowler, Orson Squire. Human Science, or, Phrenology
---. Life
Freshel, M. R. L. The Progress Meatless Cook Book
Gilman, Charlotte Perkins. “The Housekeeper and the Food Problem”
Graham, Sylvester. The Aesculapian Tablets of the Nineteenth Century
---. A Lecture on Epidemic Diseases
Jackson, James Caleb. Consumption
---. The Training of Children
Kellogg, Ella Ervilla. Studies in Character Building
Kellogg, John Harvey. The Crippled Colon
---. The Hygienic Family Physician
---. Man, the Masterpiece
---. Practical Manual of Health and Temperance
---. The Stomach
Mussey, Reuben Dimond. Health: Its Friends and Its Foes
Nichols, Thomas Low. Esoteric Anthropology
---. “Health Maxims”
---. Nichols' Health Manual
Shew, Joel. Consumption
Stowe, Harriet Beecher. Household Papers and Stories
---. “Olympiana”
SUMMARY (Bryn Skibo, edited Deborah Madsen)
Child recommends that “Fleshy, full-blooded people will do well to eat no animal food, especially in summer” (13). As in The Frugal Housewife, she recommends fasting for the sick. However, the milk of asses, mules, or women is recommended to treat consumption and “women’s milk is said to have an efficacy superior to either” (16). The excessive consumption of “animal food” is considered to be bad for the teeth (7) and injurious to the treatment of dysentery, diarrhea, and other inflammatory diseases (14), fevers (15), whooping cough and Scarlet Fever in children (57, 62), and even burns (75). Reducing a child’s intake of animal foods is considered to be very beneficial for their health (42), though a wide variety of vegetables served in the same meal is not (ibid).
Child addresses general preventative medicine and the preparation of certain curative foods; she then turns to medicine specifically for children and ways to keep children healthy; finally she lists common medicines (of herbs and roots, poultices, narcotic poisons, external poisons, baths and fomentations, enemas, or injections, blisters, leeches, and ointments).