Health in the nursery / by Henry Ashby.

  • Henry Ashby
Date:
1905
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Health in the nursery / by Henry Ashby. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    it is not slow to learn, that it has only to cry loud enough and long enough to get all it wants. Likely enough the nurse, good soul, becomes extremely attached to her boy, and will endure any number of wakeful nights and spare no pains to make him happy. She will make a show of resistance at times, and spasmodic efforts to win authority ; but she lacks persistence, and her baby treats her with the contumely and contempt born of indulgence, and he has only to show enough impatience and temper to bring her to a sense of her iniquity, and once more she comes off second best. As time goes on he reads her face at a glance, and on any sign of weakness is more than imperious in his demands. If she thwarts him for a moment he administers a mimic chastise¬ ment with his hands ; he even uses his teeth in his rage, till the nurse is heart-rending in her entreaties and promises. If medicine has to be taken, he refuses point blank, and entreaty, bribes and threats are alike unavailing; or if sickness overtakes the child, and a doctor arrives, he will be more than human if he can be of much service. Who has not pitied a hospital nurse sent to look after a spoiled child during sickness, and has had to manage as well a foolish and interfering mother ? And yet how much she can accomplish, when the child has found out for the first time in its life that it is not the only individual in the universe, and that the world was not made for its especial amusement. Nothing is more striking than the difference in the behaviour of babies, as far as tempers and crying are concerned, between the first day or two after admission
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