The Mother's Manual of Children's DiseasesWest, Charles
Science
The Mother's Manual of Children's Diseases
West, Charles
Pediatrics -- Handbooks, manuals, etc.
As a general rule catarrhal croup is rarely met with after the age of
six. Children in whom it occurs have either seemed quite well, or at
most have been a little ailing for a day or two with cold, and cough,
and perhaps slight hoarseness. They go to bed and fall asleep as usual,
but the cough, which does not wake them, becomes suddenly noisy,
ringing, croupy, and the breathing is speedily attended with a
long-drawn sound, half-hissing, half-ringing, and the child soon wakes
alarmed, and fighting for breath, the skin bathed in perspiration, the
face flushed and anxious. The cough, the difficult breathing, and the
struggle for air last for an hour or two, or sometimes all night long,
though they gradually subside, at any rate towards the approach of
morning, when the child falls asleep, and, but for a somewhat hoarse
sounding cough, and a look of fatigue, there are but few signs of all
that it has endured.
The attack may not return, or it may recur for two or three successive
nights, though in general with lessened severity, the child during the
daytime seeming to suffer only from a slight cold, or now and then, and
so rarely that I have not known it to occur above once or twice in all
my experience, it may end in real inflammation of the windpipe; but not
in diphtheria.
Attacks of this kind may recur three, four, or more times even in
childhood, while diphtheria has no tendency to recur, but like measles
or scarlatina seldom appears more than once, though the rule is subject
to more numerous exceptions than are found in the case of the eruptive
fevers. Still the fact of an attack of this sort returning should of
itself lessen apprehension and make the parents look forward to its
issue with less anxiety than that with which they regarded its first
occurrence.
A fact which shows how large a part is played by disturbance of the
nervous system in these cases is the liability of children who have
suffered from it to attacks of asthma, often of great severity as they
grow older, while very often after the transition from childhood to
youth has passed these attacks too lessen in frequency and severity, and
often altogether cease.
There are two measures which, while waiting for the doctor's arrival,
may at once be taken, and which sometimes remove the symptoms almost as
if by magic, while even were the case one of diphtheria they would still
be of some service, and could not possibly do any harm. They are the hot
bath, and a full dose of ipecacuanha wine. The former should be as hot
as it can be borne, 93 deg. or 94 deg., and the child should be kept in it for
five minutes, and the latter should be given in a full dose, as a
teaspoonful in warm water every quarter of an hour till free vomiting
takes place. How much better soever the child may seem after the use of
these remedies, it should still be kept for two or three days under
careful medical observation.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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