OUR BABIES.

Stratford Evening Post, Volume XXXV, Issue 48, 25 February 1913, Page 3

OUR BABIES.

(By Hygeia.) Published under the auspices of the Society for the Health of Women and Children. “It is wiser u< put, up a fence at the top of a precipice than to maintain an ambulance at tne bottom.” CASTOR OIL. In every homo there is a bottle of castor oil at hand to which most parents and many nurses turn to as if by instinct. They “give ile” to children almost as impartially as the mother of Wee Macgregor, who never paused to discriminate between measles and misbehaviour. A similar reckless routine caused our mothers and grandmothers to dose us with “Gregory’s Powder” until the world recognised that more harm than good was being done by such thoughtless drugging.

it is a safe rule never to give a child medicine of any kind without a very definite and clear reason and never to give a second dose except under a doctor’s order. The less drugging a child gets the better. If sensibly reared a baby should need no medicine at all.

■ One can hear the mother exclaim in astonishment: “But, surely there is no harm in castor oil! Surely it is the best and safest thing to give for constipation or when a baby is ‘out of sorts,’ or for clearing out the system when there is a stomach ache or diarrhoea. You don’t mean to say that oil can do any harm!” Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes proclaimed with profound wisdom half a century ago: “A medicine—that is, a noxious agent such as a blister, an emetic, or a purgative—should always be presumed to be hurtful. It is always directly hurtful. It may sometimes be indirectly beneficial. . . I firmly believe that if the whole Materia Medica, as now used, coidd be sunk to the bottom of the sea, it would be all the better for mankind and all the worse for the fishes. . . That the community is still overdrugged is best proved by the fact that no families take so little medicine as those of doctors, except those of apothecaries!” Now, let ns turn to what Dr Moynihan (the leading English authority of the day on the surgical aspect of intestinal disorders) is saying on this very subject. The British Medical Journal for April, 1911, contains the following warning:— AVOID APERIENTS. “By some means or another parents should be made to know that the dosing of children with aperients is an evil, and that they' must put a check upon those ‘purgative-loving propensities’ which seem inseparable from motherhood. I would like to have the power to write in every nursery in the Kingdom in large letters in the most prominent place the two words— AVOID APERIENTS. “To give aperients to children suddenly seized with acute abdominal pain is homicidal, yet it hardly occurs to any 'mother or nurse l to do anything hut this, the most disastrous thing of all. i“The onset of sudden intense pain in the belly is Nature’s special dangersignal pointing to obstruction of the bowels by kinking or tucking-in, and is also her way of proclaiming the onset of appendicitis. Nurses ought.to know that the pain may not he in the lower part of the belly, where the appendix is situated, but at the top of the belly, in the region of the ‘pit of the stomach.’ This fact is most misleading, both to parents and nurses, because they are apt to conclude that the child has ‘swallowed something.’

“The first symptoms of an attack of acute appendicitis is pain. It is always pain, and never sickness or vomiting, nor mal-aise, nor any other symptom whatever. The pain is absolutely abrupt in onset. . . .It may be rapidly followed by shivering, sharp rise of temperature, vomiting, diarrhoea. etc.”

What does the mother do in such a case ? Having jumped to the conclusion that the child has been eating green fruit, or other indigestible food, she flies to the castor oil bottle. The proper is absolute starvation, even water being given sparingly, if at all, until the doctor arrives. The child should be put In bed and hot fomentations should be applied to the abdomen. Such measures can do no harm, always afford some relief, and are equally applicable to sudden obstruction of the bowel. In either case the use of purgatives, and delay in calling in medical aid, often puts the child beyond the hope of recovery before the doctor arrives on the scene. Castor oil does not cure constipation but makes it worse.