All wise Men agree, that Providence has furnished the World with Remedies for most human Diseases, at least in their first Stages, and Men with Knowledge to apply them. When skilful People are consulted in Time, the Medicines good, duly prepared and given, the Nurse attentive, and the Patient tractable, there is but little to be apprehended from the first Stage of any Disease which is not mortal of itself, where the Habit of Body is otherwise sound; barring such Accidents as cannot be foreseen, nor consequently obviated. But what can Physicians, Medicines, Nurses, all avail, in the Disease (otherwise ever so curable) of an untoward Creature, against whom perhaps there are great Odds that it shall not be conquered to swallow the least Portion of the most absolutely necessary Remedy; nor to submit in Sickness to the least Controul; indulged, perhaps, as it has been, in a Habit of slighting and baffling all Authority while in Health? Just nothing. No; the Trouble indeed of attending it, is doubled and trebled to those who are constantly about it; the Expence is at least the same, if not considerably augmented; and the Confusion, Affliction, and Alarms of the Parents, at the growing Danger of their spoil’d Darling, immoderately encreas’d, on finding all Remedies rendered ineffectual to it, by an Obstinacy which they (whether conscious of it or not) have heretofore been the foolish Encouragers of. In the mean time, the Disease gathers Strength, and the Child’s Wilfulness with it; and the little ungovernable Patient falls an untimely Victim to the former Mismanagement of the mistakenly fond Parents, and its own present Unruliness. To see a fond Father, in Spite of the Impotence of Tears, so general to his Sex, weeping over his Child, his Heir, his only Hope of Joy, and vainly entreating him, whom he might command, to take an easy Remedy! To behold a tender Mother, herself half spent with Grief and Fears, prostrate at her sick Favourite’s Pillow, expostulating with all the Eloquence of maternal Anxiety, and entreating, praying, coaxing it to swallow a necessary Medicine, but still in vain! To view the Parents at such a Juncture, inwardly divided, torn, and almost consumed, between the alternate Motions of Tenderness, Impatience, Love, and Anger, fruitlessly insist, where a Habit of Subjection should have already made a Word or a Look sufficient; and yet to find the humour’d Thing as resolutely bent on refusing, merely, perhaps, because so much entreated! To eye all this, I say, were surely sufficient to convince us, that it is a strange Inversion of the natural Order of Things; and has a something in it extremely absurd: and the more so, when we reflect, that the whole is an Effect of Folly in the Parents, and chiefly owing to their former Neglect of exerting a little prudential Authority.