The mother's manual of children's diseases / by Charles West.

  • Charles West
Date:
1885
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: The mother's manual of children's diseases / by Charles West. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    *3 allowed it to become the petty tyrant of the household. The child is ill, it is languid, feverish, and in pain ; no position is quite easy to it, no food pleasant to it, bed is irksome, medicine is nasty. It knows only that it suffers, it has been accustomed to have its will obeyed in everything, and cannot understand that its suffering is not at once taken away. It insists on getting up and on being dressed, or on lying in its mother’s or nurse’s lap, where the warmth of another person’s body does but aggravate its fever; it screams with passion at the approach of the doctor, it will not allow itself to be examined, it will take no medicine; the doctor is powerless, the mother heart- broken. Sickness is not the time to exercise authority which has not been put in force before; and, not once but many times, I have watched, a sad spectator, the death of children from an illness not necessarily fatal, but rendered so because it was impossible to learn the progress of disease, impossible to administer the necessary remedies. What a child has been made when well, such it will be when sick. One more point I must insist on before going into details, and that is as to the necessity of perfect truthfulness in dealing with sick children. The foolish device of telling a child when ill, that the doctor who has been sent for is its uncle or its cousin, is the outcome of the still more foolish falsehood of threatening the child with the doctor’s visit if it does not do this or that. No endeavour should be spared by nurse or parent, or by the doctor himself, to render his visit popular in the nursery. Three-fourths of the difficulties which attend the administration of medicine are commonly the result of previous bad management of the child, of foolish over-indulgence, or of still more foolish want of truthfulness. It may answer once to tell a child that medicine is nice when really it is nasty, but the trick will scarcely succeed a second time, and the one success will increase your difficulties ever after. If medicine is
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