If the constipated child nurses the mother and the mother constantly pays proper attention to her own health, and especially to her diet, the child will very seldom require physic. Indeed I would not give active physic when the child seemed well, if it did not have a passage oftener than once a week. If it has cow’s milk or other food besides the mother’s milk, do not boil the milk and you can add to the cow’s milk, corn starch, or the following: Make a thin mush by boiling a small quantity at a time of unbolted wheat flour in water and straining it through a sieve while hot. The child may sometimes be fed with this alone, a little sweetened. Molasses may be given freely, or molasses and soda. The child should be watched, and if there is occasional costiveness, and at the time any indisposition, make a suppository of common soap about an inch in length and a quarter of an inch thick, dip it in water and pass it into the rectum. Or give an injection of less than a gill of water with perhaps a teaspoonful of molasses and a pinch of salt. But I would avoid the practice of giving an enema daily, as tending to get up a bad habit in the system. Should the costiveness have provoked fever, induced pain, or excited convulsions, active physic may be given, either castor oil, magnesia, calomel, or F. 108. But be sure that costiveness is not brought on by giving paregoric or other opiates, and let a child drink freely of pure cold and fresh water. The water may be boiled to destroy germs, and then cooled in a refrigerator; it should always be boiled before being used when there is an epidemic of bowel complaint prevailing. In DYSENTERY there is a specific inflammation and ulceration of the mucous membrane of the colon, especially of the lower part, and of the rectum—there is generally some fever, frequent and bloody stools, tenesmus, and griping pains. Sometimes it attacks an infant or a delicate child, there being at first for several days diarrhœa, the motions being slimy and frothy like frogspawn, afterward entirely mucous and blood. The child is dreadfully griped, strains violently, and screams, and twists about every time it has a motion, and there is vomiting and great prostration. You should in treating the child at the breast still keep him to it, and give it no other food. If the mother’s milk is not good, procure if possible a healthy wet nurse. If the child must be fed give it cow’s milk from one healthy cow—fresh from the cow—small quantities at a time and frequently, mixed with gum arabic water. In the commencement a warm bath may be used, or as a substitute you may wrap the child in a blanket that has been previously wrung out of hot water; over this put a dry blanket and keep the child thus enveloped for twenty or thirty minutes. Formula 74 and 99 may be used, but the dose for a young child must be small to accord with its age.