In the second half of the eighteenth century, medical reformers sought to educate children (and through them, their parents) on how to take proper care of their bodies. A popular genre was the health “catechism,” which took the form of easy-to-understand questions and answers about issues such as fresh air, cleanliness, proper diet, and exercise. The catechisms often promoted new treatments, like smallpox inoculation, and opposed traditional practices of bloodletting, purging, swaddling infants, and wet-nursing. Bernhard Christoph Faust’s The Catechism of Health for the Use of Schools and for Domestic Instruction (1794), excerpted below, was distributed in schools and reached a wide audience, including Americans, through a 1798 New York edition.

Q. What does the little helpless infant stand most in need of?

A. The love and care of its mother.

Q. Can this love and care be shewn by other persons?

A. No. Nothing equals maternal love.

Q. Why does a child stand so much in need of the love and care of its mother?

A. Because the attendance and nursing, the tender and affectionate treatment which a child stands in need of, can only be expected from a mother.

Q. How ought infants to be attended and nursed?

A. They ought always to breathe fresh and pure air; be kept dry and clean, and immersed in cold water every day.

Q. Why so?

A. Because children are now, at the time alluded to, more placid, because not being irritable, they grow and thrive better.

Q. Is it good to swathe [swaddle] a child?

A. No. Swathing is a bad custom, and produces in children great anxiety and pains; it is injurious to the growth of the body, and prevents children from being kept clean and dry.

Q. Do children rest and sleep without being rocked?

A. Yes. If they be kept continually dry and clean, and in fresh air, they will rest and sleep well, if not disturbed; the rocking and carrying about of children is quite useless.

Q. It is, therefore, not advisable, I suppose, to frighten children into sleep?

A. By no means; because they may be thrown into convulsions, and get cramps.

Q. Is it necessary or good to give children composing draughts, or other medicines that tend to promote sleep?

A. No. They cause an unnatural, and of course, unwholesome sleep; and are very dangerous and hurtful.

Q. How long must a mother suckle her child?

A. For nine or twelve months.

Q. What food is most suitable for children?

A. Pure unadulterated cow’s milk, with a little water and thin gruel; grated crusts of bread, or biscuit boiled with water only, or mixed with milk….

Q. Is it good to cover their heads?

A. By no means; it causes humours to break out.

Source: Bernhard Christoph Faust, The Catechism of Health, trans. J. H. Basse (Dublin: P. Byrne, 1794), pp. 22–23.

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