Spoon food must be so administered as to allow it to touch the upper lip as little as possible. The arms should be fixed to the side to prevent them touching the face. In young infants constant attention day and night is necessary, for they are very liable to roll the head from side to side, and so bring the sutured lip in contact with the bedclothes, which causes pain and makes the child cry, a most undesirable occurrence. The state of the bowels should be attended to, and if constipation exist, a small dose of grey powder with magnesia may be advisable. The silver wire sutures should usually be taken out on the fourth day; the catgut stitches may remain a week, or some of them until absorbed, the collodion dressing being re-applied when necessary, and maintained for a few days after the catgut has disappeared or been removed. Occasionally saliva and milk soak into and under the gauze, producing a moist condition of the skin around the freshly united wound, which may lead to eczema. The gauze should then be left off, and the parts gently washed with warm boracic lotion and dusted over with a mixture of equal parts of powdered oxide of zinc and starch. In mild cases without alveolar complication the child may be put to the breast on the fifth or sixth day, if the condition of the wound is satisfactory. But in the severe forms, or where the union is weak and threatens to give way, most careful spoon-feeding and general watchfulness must be continued. In spite, however, of every precaution, the depression of the nostril will sometimes persist or reappear as cicatricial contraction takes place, and a slight notch in the lip cannot be always prevented. It will be convenient to append here a description of some of the better known methods of operating on unilateral harelip, with a few words of criticism on each. * * * * * 1. _Graefe’s method_ is applicable only to incomplete clefts in the soft tissues. He prepares the edges by an arch-like incision (Figs. 47 A and B), and brings them together with the muco-cutaneous margin even. It will be seen that a notch must necessarily result (in spite of the successful appearance in the picture which I have borrowed) from cutting the red margin of the lip in this manner. [Illustration: FIG. 47.—Graefe’s operation. The completed lip is an impossible diagram of the result of such a section.]