Advice to a Mother on the Management of Her ChildrenChavasse, Pye Henry
Science
Advice to a Mother on the Management of Her Children
Chavasse, Pye Henry
Child care; Children -- Health and hygiene; Infants -- Health and hygiene
The principal reason why girls suffer more from costiveness than boys,
is that their habits are more sedentary; as the best opening medicines
in the world are an abundance of exercise, of muscular exertion, and
of fresh air. Unfortunately, poor girls in this enlightened age must
be engaged, sitting all the while, several hours every day at fancy
work, the piano, and other accomplishments; they, consequently, have
little time for exercise of any kind. The bowels, as a matter of
course, become constipated; they are, therefore, dosed with pills,
with black draughts, with brimstone and treacle--Oh! the abomination!
--and with medicines of that class, almost _ad infinitum_. What is the
consequence? Opening medicines, by constant repetition, lose their
effects, and, therefore, require to be made stronger and still
stronger, until at length, the strongest will scarcely act at all, and
the poor unfortunate girl, when she becomes a woman, _if she ever does
become one_, is spiritless, heavy, doll, and listless, requiring daily
doses of physic, until she almost lives on medicine!
All this misery and wretchedness proceed from Nature's laws having
been set at defiance, from _artificial_ means taking the place of
_natural_ ones--from a mother adopting as her rule and guide fashion
and folly, rather than reason and common sense. When will a mother
awake from her folly and stupidity? This is strong language to address
to a lady, but it is not stronger than the subject demands.
Mothers of England do, let me entreat you, ponder well upon what I
have said. Do rescue your girls from the bondage of fashion and of
folly, which is worse than the bondage of the Egyptian task masters,
for the Israelites did, in making bricks without straw, work m the
open air--"So the people were scattered abroad throughout all the land
of Egypt to gather stubble instead of straw," but your girls, many of
them, at least, have no work, either in the house or in the open
air--they have no exercise whatever. They are poor, drawling,
dawdling, miserable nonentities, with muscles, for the want of proper
exercise, like ribands, and with faces, for the lack of fresh air, as
white as a sheet of paper. What a host of charming girls are yearly
sacrificed at the shrine of fashion and of folly.
Another, and a frequent cause of costiveness, is the bad habit of
disobeying the call of having the bowels opened. The moment there is
the slightest inclination to relieve the bowels, _instantly_ it ought
to be attended to, or serious results will follow. Let me urge a
mother to instil into her daughter's mind the importance of this
advice.
379. _Young people are subject to pimples on the face, what is the
remedy_?
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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