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                         ‘This summer we had a crop of what we called “Armistice babies’‘How I wish you could see the way in which my little ones are gaining in weight as a result of what I am doing for them. My records comprise today 75 babies, 178 children from two to six, and 534 school children. A number of these, a large number, have goats and chickens and rabbits or are being supplies regulary with Powdered or Malted milk or condensed milk and cocoa, or other portable supplies, and their mothers follow with eagerness the gains in their weights, comparing them with the standard weights on the big card and praying for the day when their child’s weight will reach that standard.I have worried over a three weeks old baby: he was given everything needed in the way of nursing bottles and nipples, and the simplest formula but it just doesn’t thrive. At three months he weighs less than eight pounds. And a charming baby too. So I just asked the mother to give him to me to take him to the hospital at Blérancourt and let them keep him until he was older and thriving.The baby is now in the care of an English nurse, and thriving because everything is regular and roomy and quiet and rightly done. So he is going to live. None of my seventy odd babies has died this summer.’Late summer 1919, Mary Breckinridge, American nurse & midwife in Blérancourt, France. “She traveled to rural France after WW1 to work for the American Committee for Devastated France. Caring for infants, children, and mothers on the brink of starvation and poverty in the wake of destruction and occupation, Breckinridge began to practice the public health outreach that she would eventually implement as the first of its kind in the United States” – Letters from Devastation: Mary Breckinridge in the Aisne, 1919 – Photos: Mary Breckinridge, nurses, and physicians, of the American Committee, at work, in and around, Blérancourt, France - Ministère de la Culture, France -- source link

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