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.

    29/264 page 13
    But surely this is not so. I have attempted to emphasise the fact that the infant is profoundly influenced by his environment; that while hereditary influences may be strong, yet the influence exerted by our earliest associates, though their faces and names may have long since passed into oblivion, must have helped to mould our characters and guide our destinies. It is just here that the moral comes in. Let me plead for the better education and most careful selection of the British nursemaid. Dare I go further, and suggest that there is some one behind the nursemaid, whose wisdom is not always as supreme as her devotion, but from whom in the near future we shall expect better things ? Thanks to many influences at work during the last twenty years, the education of both sexes in our schools at the present time is vastly superior to what it has been in the past. Possibly a better influence than is often found in the nursery, a more intelligent supervision of the first few years of life, would render the future teacher’s task more easy and his disappoint¬ ments fewer. A study of the first few years of life cannot fail to remind us how dependent infancy is upon age. But is there no counterclaim ? The poet asks: Ah me ! What wonder working occult science Can from the ashes of our hearts, once more The bloom of youth restore ? What craft of alchemy can bid defiance To time and change, and for a single hour Renew the phantom flower ? May we not answer, that what alchemists through
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