OUR BABIES.

King Country Chronicle, Volume VI, Issue 511, 23 October 1912, Page 7

OUR BABIES.

(By Hygeia).

Published under the auspices of the Society for the Health of Women and Children. " It is wiser to put up a fence at the top of a precipice than to maintain an ambulance at the bottom."

THE TYRANNY OF HABITS. At the dawn of life it is easier to t'mould a child into good habits than into bad, but once bad habits have been formed it may be extremely difficult to eradicate them —'indeed, in spite of ail that we can do, the child may lose not only its health and strength, but may even lose its life owing to the persistence of habits which undermine vitality and the resistivenesa of the organism. One of the most striking instances in this connection is what Darwin tells us as to his experiments with certain insects. I cannot at the moment recall the details, but the essential point was as follows: —In nature the insects in question lived on certain leaves and grew apace—say it was the paper-mulberry. Darwin started them on other leaves instead —say lettuce leaves. Once the insects had acquired a taste for the wrong leaves they would eat nothing elße. Nothing would induce them to go back to their natural food, though the wrong food did not nourish them properly, and invariably lead to their premature death. My readers will realise how closely this accords with what may take place in the case of children who are allowed to drift into the practice of "earth-eating," or other abnormal habits.

The following concluding remarks quoted from Dr Still further illustrate the subject:— "Stewart H., aged one year and a-half, was brought because for the last two months he had taken to eat ing mud, hearthstone, bits of brick, soap, or anything he could get hold of. He was particularly fond of the white plaster off toy horses. His appetite for normal food as bad. The bowels had been constipated, and occasionally after eating such things as those mentioned he reached. The child was very irritable and during the persistence of the dirt eating habit he had begun to sleep badly, talking in his sleep and starting ud in terror at night. He was intelligent, and showed no signs of disease, except some rickes. Three months later he was taken to Scotland, with the resuit that his general health improved greatly, and his appetite became good, and he lost his craving for unnatural food altogether. "Mud and mortar seem to be special favourites with these children. Coal, cinders, and gravel were also mentioned in some of my cases. In nine out of my 14 cases the habit began in the second year of life. In one only it began in the first year (at eight months); in two it began in the fourth year. Now, what is the signicafince of this curious perversion of appetite. As I have mentioned, there was nothing in any of the cases to which I have referred to suggest any mental deficiency. Imbeciles often show a similar habit of dirt eating, but in them it is less strange, for it is associated usually with an extreme degree of mental deficiency. Some light is thrown upon the point by disorders with which pica is associated. It goes, I think, in the majority of cases with definite indications of the 'nervous' temperament. One child I had seen a few months earlier for spasmodic nodding, another a few monthß after the pica ceased was attended for wetting the bed, another subsequently developed stuttering and somnambulism, others, like the cases I have mentioned, show an abnormal passionateness or excitability. No doubt these nervous symptoms are aggravated by more or less digestive disturbance set up by the abnormal material 6aten, but I think that the development of other nervous disorders, in some cases after the pica has entirely ceased, and the family history in others, go to prove that the nervousness is partly at least cause rather than effect. "In almost all cases the appetite for ordinary food is extremely poor—in fact, it is often this rather than the dirt eating which excites the mother's anxiety. The abdomen is usually large, the stools sometimes certain mucus, and the bowels are costive or irregular. It is natural enough that such symptoms should oe induced by the indigestible substanceß eaten; but in some cases it has seemed to me clear, that there was digestive disturbance before this habit began, and I suspect that this is so in the majority of cases, and that the subsequent discomfort, hardly felt as such perhaps by the child, plays some part in exciting the habit of dirt eating in a nervous child. This is confirmed, I think, by the effect of treatment. The duration of the habit is often months, or even some years, if no special measures are taken for its cure."

TREATMENT. The first essential in treatment is to prevent the child obtaining the dirt, coal, mortar, or other injurious substance for which it craves; the second is to improve its general health, especially its digestion. There is no part of the treatment more valuable than a few weeks at a bracing seaside place, or, if this ia not attainable, at some high standing, breezy, inland country place. At the same time, it will be necessary to aid digestion by the most careful dieting, and care must be taken that the food is not such as to set up fermentation in the bowels, or to keep up a mucous catarrh by its irritating resdiue. I need not repeat here what I have already said elsewhere on the subject of feeding and indigestion. These cases of pica call for careful adaptation of the diet to the digestive capacity of the particular child. —Geo. Frederic Still, M.A., M.D., F.R.C.P., Professor of Disease of Children, King's College, London.