"
There is no point on which medical men so emphatically lift the voice
of warning as in reference to administering medicines to infants. It
is so difficult to discover what is the matter with an infant, its
frame is so delicate and so susceptible, and slight causes have such
a powerful influence, that it requires the utmost skill and judgment
to ascertain what would be proper medicines, and the proper quantity
to be given.
Says Dr. Combe, "That there are cases in which active means must be
promptly used to save the child, is perfectly true. But it is not less
certain that these are cases of which no mother or nurse ought to
attempt the treatment. As a general rule, where the child is well
managed, medicine, of any kind, is very rarely required; and if disease
were more generally regarded in its true light, not as something thrust
into the system, which requires to be expelled by force, but as an
aberration from a natural mode of action, produced by some external
cause, we should be in less haste to attack it by medicine, and more
watchful in its prevention. Accordingly, where a constant demand for
medicine exists in a nursery, the mother may rest assured that there
is something essentially wrong in the treatment of her children.
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