The Mother's Manual of Children's DiseasesWest, Charles
Science
The Mother's Manual of Children's Diseases
West, Charles
Pediatrics -- Handbooks, manuals, etc.
But there are more hopeful cases sometimes met with, those namely of
children in whom, either from simple weakness, or from that
constitutional disorder called rickets, bone formation has been
backward, and the head has consequently long remained unclosed. If such
children, either from the irritation of teething, or from the straining
during paroxysms of hooping cough, suffer from congestion of the brain,
fluid may be poured out, which, not being compressed by the too yielding
skull, may in consequence enlarge it. These cases, however, may be
distinguished from the other more serious ones by the date of their
commencement, which is always much later than that of the other form, by
the symptoms which attend them being less severe, and by the enlargement
of the skull being far slighter.
Still they require watching, for while with improved health the
enlargement ceases, the fluid is in a measure absorbed, and the head
diminishes in size, though always remaining larger than the average;
brain mischief is yet more readily set up in children with such
antecedents than in others.
The anxiety of parents about the size or shape of their child's head
after infancy has passed, is perfectly needless. When the head has once
closed it always remains so. An odd shape, with an unusual protuberance
of the forehead and the hind head, sometimes remain as the evidence of
that condition in infancy to which I have just referred. It is, however,
an evidence of mischief passed, not of mischief going on. In children
too who have suffered from rickets, an affection rarely met with except
among the poor in crowded cities, distortion of the limbs is often
associated with a peculiar form of the skull, but in this too there is
nothing to call for anxiety, still less to excite alarm. It is only a
preternaturally small head and shelving forehead, which are found
associated with mental deficiency; otherwise the greatest varieties of
size and shape, of symmetry, or of want of it, may be associated with an
equal variety of intellectual endowment, which is just as likely to be
above as below the average.
=Brain Disorder from Exhaustion.=--It may at first sight appear strange
that before leaving the subject of congestion and inflammation of the
brain, I should find it necessary to give a caution against being misled
by symptoms which though in some respects similar to those of congestion
or inflammation, are in reality due to an exactly opposite condition.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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