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.

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    or two of bicai-bonate of soda, or thin broth will form a suitable food for twenty-four or thirty-six hours. In all cases of any severity milk should be entirely ])rohibited for twenty-four hours, the child being fed upon veal or chicken broth or whey and cream. Febrile diarrhoea should be treated by a preliminary dose of castor oil; followed by a simple alkaline mixture, or by demulcents, such as almond oil, sweetened with glycerine, and made into an emulsion with gum tragacanth (F. 20). A few drops of ipe- cacuanha wine may be added to either mixture with advantage. In some cases a minute dose of Dover’s powder with bismuth relieves the pain in the abdomen, and procvu’es sleep. In the more severe cases, with pro- nounced intestinal inflammation, the chief aim must ever be to sustain the child by suitable nourishment, and if need be by stimulants, so as to allow the disease to run its course and reparative action to take place. In cholera infantum, when the purging is profuse and very liquid, associated with vomiting and much col- lapse—the symptoms which .specially indicate infantile cholera—a warm bath and sometimes a inu.stard bath should be given at once ; if the latter, about a table- spoonful of mustard to the gallon of water is used, and the child is kept in it till the nunse’s arms tingle. It is then to be wrapped in blankets and kept very warm in the nurse’s arms or by hot bottles. Sometimes the choleraic symptoms are associated with very high temperature, 105° to 108°, in which case the tepid bath or cold pack is to be employed frequently. The child may be piit into a bath of 85° to 90°, the temperature of the water being lowered to 80°, and may be kept in it five minutes, then wrapped in a blanket, and the process may be repeated every three or four hours if necessary. The cold bath was I'ecom- mended by Trousseau as a means of subduing nervous symptoms, and lately its employment has again been advocated in these bad cases of summer diarrhoea a.ssociated Avith high fever, but it is a severe
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