Budin –  De la puériculture après la naissance – English Summary

Budin, Pierre: De la puériculture après la naissance, 1900. 10th Congrès International d’Hygiène et Démographie, Paris. Source: Cnum.

This is Budin’s report immediately following Pinard’s in the same session — Xe Congrès international d’hygiène et de démographie (Paris, 1900), Section IV “Hygiène des collectivités,” pp. 426–433, with discussion running to 436. Where Pinard took the antenatal phase and disparaged the incubator, Budin takes the postnatal phase and builds the positive case for the consultation/milk-depot program. The two reports are designed as complementary halves.

Summary of the report

Budin opens on the scale of the problem: infant mortality is appallingly high in the first weeks and months. Drawing on Balestre and Giletta de Saint-Joseph’s statistics for Paris and French towns over 30,000, he gives infant (0–1) deaths as a share of total mortality averaging 16.6% (1892–97), but in 1897 reaching 20% at Nancy, 38% at Lille and Wattrelos, and 50% at Halluin — a fifth to a half of all deaths. Breeders, he notes pointedly, take every precaution against losing young stock; what do parents, cities, and the State do for infants?

He then anatomizes the causes. Digestive then respiratory disease together account for 53% of infant deaths; diarrhea alone is 38.5%, pulmonary affections 14.5%, all other causes 47%. The two are seasonally opposite: diarrhea climbs with heat (21% of deaths in January to ~60% in July–August), pulmonary disease peaks in the cold. This sets up his remedies. For contagious and eruptive disease: isolation, disinfection, vaccination, the Roux–Behring diphtheria serum. For winter: guard against chilling, especially deadly in the débiles — and here he supplies a figure directly relevant to your incubator work: at the Maternité, feeble infants under 2,000 g whose rectal temperature fell to 32 °C or below died at 98%, and at 90% between 32° and 33.5°.

But the heart of the report is digestive disease and feeding. Diarrhea strikes the bottle-fed far harder than the breastfed; his Paris 1898 chart shows the bottle-fed mortality curve rising so abruptly in the summer heat that, in his own simile, it “recalls the appearance of the Eiffel Tower.” First conclusion: promote breastfeeding, reduce artificial feeding. But since some breastfed infants die too, and since poor women are left to ignorant or harmful advice and consult a doctor only once the child is already sick, mothers need ongoing guidance.

Finally, Budin lays out the institutional history, in his own words: in 1892 he created at the Charité the first consultation des nourrissons, then a second at the Maternité in 1895 and a third at the clinique Tarnier in 1898. The mechanism: weekly return visits, examination and weighing, a register that yields a growth curve, breastfeeding encouraged, sterilized milk prescribed in measured amounts for mixed or artificial feeding, overfeeding and early solids avoided. Each consultation becomes “a veritable School of Mothers.” He notes the model has spread across Paris and France — and credits Dr Dufour of Fécamp with giving these institutions “the picturesque name ‘Gouttes de lait,'” a clean primary attestation of the Budin–Dufour relationship and of who coined the term. He backs the claim with results: digestive mortality is “almost nil” in the consultations attached to Paris obstetric services, and Dufour saw enteritis mortality fall to 2.26% and 1.28% in 1897–99 against 12% and 9.67% in Fécamp town at large. He closes with the supporting apparatus — supervised crèches using sterilized milk, the loi Roussel, convalescent asiles (including the asile Ledru-Rollin, the same institution underpinning Pinard’s rest data), maternal-nursing subsidies, and the Laiterie philanthropique against watered and skimmed city milk — and a three-part summary: cut contagious disease, prevent winter chilling, and all but eliminate the diarrheas, and infant mortality falls considerably.

Summary of the discussion

Dr E. Vidal (Hyères), heading the Var’s early-childhood protection committee, confirms Budin’s figures and reports the Var’s intestinal-disease share exceeding 50% (longer hot season). He marshals loi Roussel data — infant mortality 17.50% under paternal supervision versus 11.01% under Roussel protection departmentally, and 15.3% versus 6.6% in his own canton of Hyères — defends the law’s “hygienic and patriarchal” character, warns against turning medical inspectors into salaried functionaries, and proposes a resolution: no one may practice the trade of éleveuse d’enfants without a certificate of professional capacity.

Dr Ledé urges that an international congress canvass what other nations have done, observes that the French reports concern mainly infants of women delivering in Paris maternities, and corrects a circulating error — the claim (in a report by a Dr de Rothschild, foreign to this congress) that French infant mortality reaches 80% — as something that “never existed except in newspaper articles.” He would broaden Vidal’s resolution to require anyone raising a child at home to hold a certificate attesting both lodging salubrity and capacity.

Dr Drouineau wants Budin’s closing remark on milk fraud turned into an imperative resolution, given how exposed the bottle-fed infant is to fraudulent ordinary and commercial sterilized milk. Budin replies candidly that he hadn’t proposed it himself because he fears it would go nowhere — he served on a Paris city commission that formulated conclusions on exactly this and nothing came of it — but he’ll vote it gladly; Drouineau presses on, arguing congress resolutions strengthen local initiative. Dr Boury then adds a demand to ban unhealthy long-tube feeding bottles (already prohibited by decree in the Aisne) in favor of tubeless ones, and Drouineau backs an energetic stand, “as the Academy did,” against long-tube bottles.

The section (Section IV) adopts two resolutions: first, that no one may work as an éleveuse d’enfants without a certificate of professional capacity; second, that municipalities must prevent the sale, under the name of milk, of poor and dangerous liquids, and that long-tube bottles be formally prohibited.

Citation:

The report:

Budin, P. “De la puériculture après la naissance” (rapport), suivi de discussion (MM. Vidal, Ledé, Drouineau, Budin, Boury). In Xe Congrès international d’hygiène et de démographie à Paris en 1900 […]. Compte rendu publié par le secrétariat général du congrès. Paris: Masson et Cie, 1900, pp. 426–[436].

The volume:

Xe Congrès international d’hygiène et de démographie à Paris en 1900 tenu [à partir du 10 août]. Compte rendu publié par le secrétariat général du congrès. Paris: Masson et Cie, 1900. 1 vol. ([4]–1070 p.), 24 cm. Section IV, “Hygiène des collectivités.”

Stable identifiers for the volume: permanent URL https://cnum.cnam.fr/redir?8XAE479; CNAM shelfmark 8 Xae 479; SUDOC notice https://www.sudoc.fr/025529560.

Last Updated on 07/06/26