A Book of Medical Discourses, in Two Parts — Text and Context

Feeding Advice and Bottle Design

The excerpts reveal Crumpler’s detailed attention to infant feeding. In Chapter XVI, she describes a homemade sucking-bottle: “a small bottle holding an ounce… a smooth round hole made in the cork, through which to put a quill; the whole to be well covered with a strong soft linen.” She contrasts this with modern rubber tubes and nipples, which “if composed of healthy material, removed from the mouth and washed as soon as possible after using, may do as well.” Crumpler warns against leaving a child alone with a bottle: “the danger of strangulation becomes more imminent if the child is left alone.” She also criticizes oversized nipple holes made for “selfish convenience” and notes that infants can be “literally worn out sucking, trying to get a bare subsistence.” Her feeding schedule is precise: for a newborn, “four ounces of milk or two of cream will suffice it during the day,” with a pint of milk or half a pint of cream lasting a full day for a baby one to four weeks old.

Voice and Rhetorical Strategy

Crumpler’s prose is assertive and occasionally combative. She refers to “women doctors, or, more properly speaking, doctresses of medicine,” and notes that they “are, nevertheless, by them considered to be in their proper sphere in the confinement-room and nursery.” She adds, “While I feel under no obligations to them for their charity, I must admit their honesty and truthfulness in the matter.” This passage suggests a tension with male physicians, whom she thanks for their candor but does not defer to. Elsewhere, she appeals to common sense: “The saliva of the glands of the mouth and the juices of the stomach are as fully able to dilute and separate the life principles of milk for a babe, as they are to prepare solid food for the maintenance of the adult.” She also uses vivid, concrete imagery, such as the infant “tugging away between naps, for hours” or being pacified by “the rubber nipple of a filthy-smelling sucking-bottle continually stuck in the mouth.”

Scope and Limitations of the Excerpts

The Project Gutenberg excerpts cover only the introduction, part of Chapter XVI, and the closing license. The table of contents lists twenty chapters in Part First, including “How to Marry,” “The Present Modes of Washing and Dressing the New-born,” “The Uselessness of ‘Baby Medicines’ during the Month,” and “Cholera Infantum versus Starvation.” Part Second begins at page 120 with “Miscellaneous Information.” The catalog subjects—women’s health, child care, infants—are reflected in the excerpts, but the actual content appears more focused on infant feeding and bowel complaints than on broader women’s health topics. The second part’s contents are not excerpted, so its treatment of “the beginning of womanhood” and “distressing complaints of women” cannot be assessed from the available text. Crumpler’s claim to have traveled widely and served as a family nurse is stated but not corroborated by specific cases in the excerpts.

Readers should note that the excerpts represent only a fraction of the full work. The table of contents suggests a structured manual, but the second part’s contents are not sampled here. Crumpler’s voice—practical, opinionated, and aware of her position as a woman physician—comes through clearly in the feeding advice and her remarks on medical hierarchy. Those interested in nineteenth-century domestic medicine or early African American women physicians will find this a primary source of interest, though the complete text is needed to evaluate its full scope.

Reading Crumpler’s calm, practical words on feeding infants, I felt the quiet confidence of a doctor who trusted simple observation. It reminded me of another old book, An Account of the Foxglove and some of its Medical Uses With Practical Remarks on Dropsy and Other Diseases — Context and Discussion, where William Withering’s careful notes on a humble plant carry that same unhurried certainty. Both feel like handwritten letters from another century, warm with earned wisdom.