The testimony of physicians who have specialized in the care and feeding of children, and of mothers who have raised normal babies, proves that both teething and weaning are normal and gradual operations which do not seriously disturb the child’s health, if the digestion is in good condition. Teething in particular is often made the excuse or the cloak for chronic disturbances of the digestion, which should have been corrected long before the time for dentition arrived. The average child does not cut its first teeth until the sixth month, yet it is not unusual to hear a mother claim that an attack of indigestion, vomiting, or diarrhea in a three months’ old child is due to the fact that teeth are beginning to make trouble. If the child is kept in all-round good condition, teething is merely a part of its all-round development, no more troublesome than the growth of the hair on the head, or the nails on the fingers. To the healthy child, the cutting of each successive tooth may bring a trifling irritability, restlessness or wakefulness for a few nights, and drooling. The baby may even suffer from loss of appetite, a very slight fever, light vomiting, or streaks of undigested food in the stools; but these symptoms will last only a few days and the baby will recuperate rapidly. When the child is not in a healthy condition, and especially if it is fed irregularly and improperly, these slight disturbances take on a more serious form. The fever will run up to 101° or 102° F. The child will be unable to retain food, and the vomiting will be severe. Diarrhea next sets in, and the child is in a fair way to develop a case of cholera infantum, the dread disease responsible for the high death rate among children under one year of age. Summer complaint, as it is commonly called, is not due to teething, however, but to the bad condition of the digestive organs, which teething aggravates. While it is important to guard the baby’s digestion always, it is even more important to prepare his entire system for the process of teething by setting the digestive organs in good order before—not after—the process starts. Here, indeed, the proverbial ounce of prevention is worth many pounds of cure. It is far easier to put stomach and bowels into good shape before the first tooth appears than it is to check the diarrhea which comes when the child’s digestion is too weak to meet the slight added strain of dentition.