THE FAMILY PHYSICIAN. 



DISEASES OF CHILDREN. 



Special Susceptibility of Children to Disease Old-fashioned Methods of Treatment Indications of 

 Disease Temperature Diseases of Children, in Alphabetical Order, with their Symptoms an<l 

 Treatment. 



A REFERENCE to the returns of the Registrar-General (which invariably show in 

 definite numbers what we all know by common experience, viz., the great mor- 

 tality among children under five years of age) will be sufficient to prove that 

 tin- early years of life constitute a time at which we are more vulnerable to 

 diM-as*' than at any other period of our existence. The reason for this is twofold. 

 Firstly, because there are several diseases which are of so infectious a nature 

 that we are sure to contract them the first time that we come in contact with their 

 contagion. Such are whooping-cough and measles, which are in no sense properly 

 peculiar to childhood, but are rather to be considered as peculiar to and inseparable 

 from life in crowded communities. Secondly, the proneness to disease in early life 

 is by reason of the highly impressionable nature of the body at that period. 

 Influences which have no effect upon us in adult life may dining our early years be 

 productive of very grave results indeed. All the vital processes are very active the 

 }>ody is growing rapidly. Great results spring from trifling causes, and disease once 

 started is liable to spread with very great rapidity. The processes of dentition, and 

 especially of the first dentition, produce a general irritation and disturbance of the 

 body, which causes very often a slight febrile reaction, during which the child is 

 peculiarly susceptible to all evil influences. 



Many of the diseases of childhood may be averted by a very small amount of 

 care in the feeding and nursing of children, and it is not too much to say that the 

 healthy child of a careful and discreet mother may pass through its infancy without 

 taking a dose of medicine. 



It used to be the fashion to dose children enormously, and even now one may 

 ionally see in old-fashioned houses a horrible instrument of torture called a 

 physic spoon, with which unhappy children are loaded, as it were, with "charges" 

 of the most nauseous compounds it is possible to imagine. 



In the present day, however, we hope that wiser counsels prevail, and that 

 unnecessary dosing has nearly died out. Every unnecessary dose of medicine given 

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