The maternal management of children, in health and diseaseBull, Thomas
Science
The maternal management of children, in health and disease
Bull, Thomas
Child care
The most frequent complication with hooping-cough is inflammation of
the air-tubes of the lungs. This is extremely frequent during spring
and winter, especially in the months of February, March, and April,
owing to the prevalence of easterly winds at this season. It is not my
intention to detail the symptoms of this affection, only to point out
those which will enable a parent to recognise its approach. A parent
then may take warning, and fear the approach of mischief, when she
observes the fits of coughing become more frequent and more distressing
to the child, and the breathing hurried in the intervals of the
paroxysm; when any exertion or speaking causes increased difficulty of
breathing or panting; when the expectoration becomes less abundant, and
difficult to get up; when there is no longer, or at all events less
frequent, vomiting after the cough, and more or less febrile symptoms
present.
If the lungs themselves are attacked by inflammation, most of the
symptoms already pointed out will occur; the cough will be frequent,
in short paroxysms; the vomiting will not take place; the breathing
will be very quick and hurried; and as the disease advances the hoop
will cease.
If hooping-cough attack a child whilst teething, or from six months to
two or three years of age, it is very common for the brain to suffer,
and convulsions and water on the head to occur, particularly if the
latter disease prevails in the family. Whenever the paroxysm of cough
is increased in violence, the characteristic hoop disappearing, and the
face becomes very livid; the hands clenched, and the thumbs drawn into
the palms; the head hot, and marked fits of drowsiness and languor; and
the child, during sleep, screaming out, or grinding its teeth,--
something wrong about the head ought to be anticipated. Of the
treatment we have here nothing to say, except that the gums must be
carefully examined, and scarified if they require it, and the
temperature of the head reduced by cold sponging, or the application of
a bag of ice when necessary. The chief duty, however, of the parent is
to be alive to these symptoms, and early to detect the incipient
mischief, that by a prompt application of efficient means the accession
of so formidable a malady may be prevented.
To specific remedies for this disease it is scarcely necessary to
allude, after what has been advanced, except by way of warning. In the
simple form of the complaint such medicines are superfluous, or rather
some of them, from their violent properties, most dangerous; in the
complicated forms of the disease they are inadmissible.
The indiscriminate use of purgatives, also, a parent should avoid.
Bowel affections are not an infrequent attendant upon hooping-cough,
and always aggravate the primary disorder.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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