The Mother's Manual of Children's DiseasesWest, Charles
Science
The Mother's Manual of Children's Diseases
West, Charles
Pediatrics -- Handbooks, manuals, etc.
The ocular spectra are usually far more vivid and detailed. Those which
occur in the waking state are by no means always painful, though their
strangeness not infrequently alarms the child, and his horror at the
dark arises, not from his seeing nothing, but from his seeing too much.
Some imaginative children amuse themselves with these phantasms, and
then, if encouraged to relate them, will constantly transgress the
boundary line between truth and falsehood, and weave their little
romance. When they happen on waking they are usually preceded by
frightful dreams, but the image which the child sees then is not the
mere recollection of the dream, but a new, distinct, though painful
impression; generally of some animal to which the child points, as now
here, now there. These night terrors from the very circumstantial
character of the impressions which attend them, often, as I have already
said, occasion needless anxiety as to the importance of the cause on
which they depend.
Sleep-walking in its smaller degrees of getting out of bed at night, is
by no means unusual in childhood; but the greater degrees of
somnambulism are certainly rare; and I have always found them dependent
on undue mental work; not always, indeed, on the tasks being excessive,
but sometimes on the over-anxiety of the child to make progress. I have
not yet known a poor person's child a somnambulist.
But not only are the perceptions more acute in childhood than in adult
life, the sensibilities are more intense. The child's emotions, indeed,
are often transitory--generally very transitory; but while they last
they produce results far greater than in the grown person. In the case
of the latter, recollection of the past, anticipation of the future, or
even the duties of the present, control the overwhelming sorrow, or call
forth the energies needed to bear it. The child lives in the present,
and this present is but the reflection of the world around, its
impressions uncontrolled by experience, ungoverned by reason.
The broken-heartedness of a child on leaving home is not the expression
only of intense affection for its friends or relations, it is the shock
of separation from the familiar objects which have surrounded it; and I
have not infrequently seen children inconsolable when removed from homes
that were most wretched, or from relations who were most unkind. Every
now and then, indeed, I have been compelled to send children home from
the hospital because no love nor care could reconcile them to the change
from home; and they have refused to eat, and spent their nights in
weeping. The feeling is an unreasoning one, like the home-sickness of
the mountaineer.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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