Domestic medicine, or, A treatise on the prevention and cure of diseases by regimen and simple medicines : with an appendix, containing a dispensatory for the use of private practitioners / by William Buchan.

  • Buchan, William, 1729-1805.
Date:
1803
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Domestic medicine, or, A treatise on the prevention and cure of diseases by regimen and simple medicines : with an appendix, containing a dispensatory for the use of private practitioners / by William Buchan. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by King’s College London. The original may be consulted at King’s College London.

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    they belong. Effeminacy ever will prove the ruin of any flare where it prevails and, when its foundations are laid in infancy, it can never afterwards be wholly eradicated. Parents who love their offspring, and wifli well to their country, ought therefore, in the manage- ment of their children, to avoid every thing that may have a tendency to make them weak or effeminate, and to take every method in their power to render their conftitutions ftrong and hardy. • By arts like thefe Laconia nurs’d of old her hardy fons ; /\nd Rome’s unconquer’d legions urg’d their way. Unhurt, thro’ every toil in every clime *. Few things tend more to the deftru<5tion of children than drenching them with drugs. That medicine may beJometimes neceffary for children, I do not deny; but that it hurts them ten times for once it does them good, I will venture to affert. A London mother, the moment her child feems to ail any thing, runs immediately to the apothecary, who throws in his powders, pills, and po- tions, till the poor infant is poifoned; when the child might have been reflored to perfedt health by a change of diet, air, exercile, clothing, or fome very eafy and fimple regulation. But mifguided fondnefs is not fatisfied with drugging children from the apothecary’s fhop : many of them are fed from the fame quarter. A lfarch from the Weft Indies, called flour of arrow-root, is the food of thofe infants whofe parents can afford to pay for it. I lately offended a mother very much by faying, it was not half fo good as oatmeal, though more than ten times the price. Of this, however, fhe had fufficient proof by a child in her arms, who had been fed on that root, and, though a year and a half old, could fcarcely put a foot to the ground, while her neighbour’s child, only nine months old, but nurfed in the north country manner, could, by a hold of the finger, run all over the houfe. I have * Armflrong.