However, even more than all of these items, one matter deserves the keenest attention by parents and particularly by the mothers to their wet nurses and child minders themselves, whom one not only often sees kissing and hugging the children in their care with lustful feelings but whom I myself have sometimes noticed more than distinctly to have their hands frequently underneath the children’s clothes out of lustfulness, there seeking to excite sensations that ought to have slumbered for a long time yet. In this way, such moral monsters lay the groundwork for so many moral and physical ailments due to the circumstance that every gratifying stimulus the children have experienced once encourages them to repeat it themselves. [ . . . ] Since this pernicious children’s plague – for this name it deserves almost more justifiably so than the smallpox – is indeed not so rare at all here in Rostock but produces enough examples for physicians among smaller and older children of both sexes, I deem it all the more a duty to speak about it and on this occasion make all mothers not only suspicious toward any wet nurse and child minder but at the same time urge them to take their own supervision of their children seriously. [ . . . ]
In our parts, most children begin to walk toward the end of their first year, many at a later time as well. However, only among parents from the lower classes, they learn it in a natural way, that is, by crawling and by their own attempts to keep upright and move from one spot to the next. Anyone keeping a wet nurse or a child minder, though, tends to provide them with a cushioned ‘fall hat’ and a walking harness, by means of which they often learn to walk only by very caricature-like movements. [ . . . ] But all of these methods of teaching children to walk are actually not useful at all. The child squeezes its chest too much, gets in the habit of a strange gait, and is not secured from falling down, falling at least the more often when left to its own devices. Recently, however, I have found quite frequently even among more distinguished parents that they allow their little ones to learn walking in a more natural way. [ . . . ]
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