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The too common and reprehensible practice of a parent administering frequent aperients, especially calomel and jalap, to her child. Another cause, is allowing him to remain for a quarter of an hour or more at a time on his chair; this induces him to strain, and to force the gut down. What are the remedies?
Bulky powders should be avoided, and the child who has learned to take rhubarb and magnesia, or Gregory's powder without resistance, certainly does credit to his training. Aperients are the medicines most frequently needed in the minor ailments of children, and a wise mother will not undertake herself the management of serious diseases.
Let then women, if they will give medicine, give homoeopathic medicine. It won't do any harm. An almost universal error among women is the supposition that everybody must have the bowels opened once in every twenty-four hours or must fly immediately to aperients. The reverse is the conclusion of experience.
I have generally found a draught, early every morning, of cold pump water, the eating either of Huntley and Palmer's loaf ginger-bread, or of oatmeal gingerbread, a variety of animal and vegetable food, ripe sound fruit, Muscatel raisins, a fig, or an orange after dinner, and, when he be old enough, coffee and milk instead of tea and milk, to have the desired effect, more especially if, for a time, aperients be studiously avoided.
The best way to stew either prunes or French plums, is the following: Put a pound of either prunes or French plums, and two tablespoonfuls of raw sugar, into a brown jar; cover them with water; put them into a slow oven, and stew them for three or four hours. Both stewed rhubarb and stewed pears often act as mild and gentle aperients.
Of all aperients castor oil is perhaps the safest, the least irritating, the most generally applicable; it acts on the bowels and does nothing more. The idea that it tends specially to produce constipation afterwards is unfounded; it does not do so more than other aperients.
If these two points are attended to, benefit may then be looked for from the employment of tonics, and as the general health improves the constipated condition of the bowels, so usual in these cases, will by degrees disappear; while if aperients are needed those simple remedies only should be employed of which I spoke in the first part of this book, and the use of mercurials is not to be resorted to without distinct medical order.
All aperients quicken for a time what is termed the peristaltic action of the bowels; that is to say, their constant movement in a direction from the stomach to the lower bowel, which, as well as a contraction on themselves, is constantly going on in every living animal, and continues even for some time after death.
Give him no aperients, or it might, in action, force the pin into the bowel. I have known more than one instance where a child, after swallowing a pin, to have, voided it in his motion. If a child swallow a coin of any kind, is danger likely, to ensue, and what ought to be done? There is, as a rule, no danger. A dose or two of castor oil will be all that is usually necessary.
This is a doctor's subject, and I will not enter more into it; but will simply repeat, do not go on taking or giving to your children your abominable "courses of aperients," without calling in the doctor.
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