Workhouse Infant Diet

Abstract

As we have seen in the previous chapter, workhouse nurses were not disinclined to tend to pauper infants, but to what extent did they feed them dangerous foods when they got around to offering care? This chapter will analyse the feeding practices in the workhouse, and identify when and where the workhouse took on responsibility for feeding infants. We begin by relating the contemporary view of workhouse nurse feeding:

Experience has repeatedly shown that the congregation of several hand-fed infants in infant-nurseries, workhouses and elsewhere entails almost certain disease and death. Sooner or later, they are attacked by aphthae [atrophy] or diarrhoea, and no amount of care or attention will avert their death. In one instance, mentioned by Dr. Routh, where the infants … were received in an infant-nursery, an average of four out of five died …¹

Despite the endeavours of workhouse nurses to do their best for pauper infants, as the contemporary report in The British Medical Journal (BMJ) cited above indicates, the incidence of infant mortality, particularly within the workhouse, remained a concern for the medical establishment.² These concerns are shared by historians like Ruth Richardson, Angela Negrine, Jonathan Reinarz, Leonard Schwarz and the Webbs in particular, who argued that indoor pauper infants who lived in workhouses ‘outside of London’ experienced an annual death rate of a third of all infants, and these high rates continued into the early twentieth century.³ Such figures were abysmal. As Ruth Richardson notes, the workhouse nurses and the ‘care’ that they were able to provide to infant paupers was ‘dismal.’⁴