Infantile diarrhoea.

During the first two decades of the present century, physicians were especially attracted to the problems of infant feeding and its role as a cause of illness and death. It was accepted that diarrhoea seldom occurred in the breastfed infant but that in the artificially-fed infant its incidence was alarmingly high. Infantile diarrhoea was associated with a mortality rate of over 50 per cent in certain summers when the disease assumed epidemic proportions and well merited the term cholera infantum given it by the older clinicians. The aetiology was obscure and, in attempting to find an explanation, attention was fixed on the relative immunity from the disease of the breast-fed infant. It was argued that if the proportions of the individual constituents of cow's milk could be altered to correspond with those of breast milk, all might be well. Thus percentage feeding, as it was called, became popular and slight changes in the feed were made only after long Leading Article