Milk & Whisky

Is milk a proper food for healthy adults? Is whisky a proper medication for sleepless infants? Last week these questions were being hotly debated in the medical profession.

Stone Starter. The U.S. dairy industry issues a flood of calorific propaganda, blazoning on hundreds of thousands of cartons the legend, "You never outgrow your need for milk--drink three glasses of milk a day!" The message is illustrated with drawings of three generations of contented consumers. In the U.S. generally, adults are drinking far more milk as a table beverage than people in the rest of the world, where it is usually reserved for children and for cooking. What put the milk fat in the fire was a single change of rules in the Yale dining hall: instead of one big glass of milk per meal, officials issued a smaller glass but allowed the students as many refills as they wanted.

Partly in protest against a fancied inconvenience, but largely out of orneriness, the undergraduates started milk binges; many went back for four or five glasses, and endurance artists claimed to have guzzled twelve to 20. This brought a warning from Dr. John Seabury Hathaway, director of the university's department of public health, and Dr. John Woodruff Ewell, assistant director: "The normal, healthy individual can readily precipitate kidney stone formation by the simple ingestion of excessive mineral salts [in] ice cream, cheese, butter [and] milk . . . A good rule of thumb to insure ample dilution: two glasses of water for each glass of milk."

Although urologists generally advise well-nourished, adult patients to go easy on milk, a direct cause-and-effect relationship between milk consumption and formation of calcified deposits (as kidney stones or elsewhere in the body) is hard to establish. Yet many medical experts agree with Dr. Ewell. Says Manhattan's Nutritionist Dr. Norman Jolliffe: "With an adequate diet, milk is not necessary for an adult."

Bottle Babies? Manhattan's Dr. Harry Bakwin, past president of the American Academy of Pediatrics, started the ruckus over whisky when he told a Washington medical meeting that 15 drops make an acceptable sedative for a sleepless child.* Other pediatricians doubted that so minute a dose would have any detectable effect, though some said they might give it to a baby with colic if the family had no other sedative in the house. The Rev. Dr. Albert P. Shirkey of Washington's Mount Vernon Place Methodist Church was outraged. "I feel it was a terrible blunder to prescribe 'toddies for toddlers,' " he intoned from the pulpit. "To give [alcohol] to children is to have them grow up with a taste for it--maybe a craving for it. Who knows but from so innocent a beginning another alcoholic joins the ranks!"

* The method was fairly common in the 19th century, particularly among working mothers who needed to keep the kids quiet while they went to their factory jobs, used such alcoholic medications as "Mother's Blessing," "Infant's Preservative."

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