The student's guide to diseases of children.

  • Sir James Goodhart, 1st Baronet
Date:
1886
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: The student's guide to diseases of children. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by Royal College of Physicians, London. The original may be consulted at Royal College of Physicians, London.

    55/732 page 35
    CHAPTER III. DIET DISEASES : ATROPHY—FLATULENCE—COLIC- CONSTIPATION. The consideration of the diet fit for a healthy infant up to the period when it can, with certain limitations, take food in common with its parents, leads on natur- ally to the consideration of those diseases which are dependent upon imperfections in the diet, whether of quantity or quality, and to the treatment Avhich is most efficacious for their cure. These diseases are both numerous and important, whilst their heterogeneity involves us in some diffi- culties of arrangement. Perhaps the best plan that can be adopted is to take them in the order in which they seem to arrange themselves ; i. Simple wasting; 2. Diseases of the digestive tract, including colic, flatulence, constipation, diarrhoea, vomiting, indiges- tion, or gastric fever, and stomatitis. There are other diseases which are also diet diseases, such as rickets and certam of the disetvses of the skin j but it is more convenient to consider these at a later period. Simple wasting or atrophy is due to insufficient or improper food. If the food is bsid—and by that I mean indigestible—the wasting is generally associated with symptoms of intestinal disorder, which may be best treated under the head of diarrhoea, colic, and so on. Naturally enough, the two conditions, insuffi- ciency and indigestibility, are commoidy a.ssociated in practice. Nevertheless, it is well to remember that, amongst the number of infants who require dietetic treatment, the total number of cases due to simple starvation is not inconsiderable. The diagnosis must, for the most D 2
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