The Mother's Manual of Children's DiseasesWest, Charles
Science
The Mother's Manual of Children's Diseases
West, Charles
Pediatrics -- Handbooks, manuals, etc.
Any attempt at scientific arrangement of a popular book is useless. I
prefer, therefore, to consult simply the general convenience of my
readers. I think I do so best by considering first the disorders which
beset the child in the first month of its existence, during what may be
termed its transition from the condition of existence in the womb, to
its living, breathing state as an inhabitant of this world; and next the
more important ailments to which it is liable during that important time
of development which ends with the completion of teething. Afterwards
may be studied the diseases of the head, the chest, and the bowels; next
constitutional diseases, such as consumption and scrofula; and lastly,
the various fevers, as typhoid, or, as it is popularly called, remittent
fever, measles, scarlatina, and small-pox; and last of all I will add a
few remarks on the mental and moral characteristics of childhood, and
their disorders.
CHAPTER IV.
ON THE DISORDERS AND DISEASES OF CHILDREN DURING THE FIRST MONTH AFTER
BIRTH.
=Still-birth.=--The infant cries almost as soon as it comes into the
world. The cry is the evidence that air has entered its lungs, that the
blood has now begun to take a different course from that which it
followed before birth, and that the child has entered on a new
existence. The child who does not cry, does not breathe; it is said to
be _still-born_; its quietude means death.
After a long or a difficult labour, or after the use of instruments, the
child is sometimes still-born in consequence of blood being poured out
on its brain, and it is thus killed before birth by apoplexy. This,
however, is not usually the case, but the child is generally still-born
because some cause or other, generally the protraction of labour,
interfered with the due changes of its blood within the womb, and it is
born suffocated before its birth, and consequently unable to make the
necessary efforts to breathe afterwards.
Drowned people are often resuscitated; the child's case is analogous to
theirs; and in both the same measures have to be pursued, namely to try
to establish respiration. The degree of the warmth of the child's body,
the resistance of its muscles, the red tint or the white colour of its
surface, the presence or absence of perceptible beating of its heart,
measure the chances of success. Sometimes mere exposure to the cold air
produces the necessary effect; at other times breathing is excited by
dashing cold water in the child's face, by slapping it, by tickling its
nostrils, or by dipping it for a few seconds in a hot bath at 100 deg. or
102 deg.; and then swinging it a few times backwards and forwards in the
air.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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