HEALTH HINTS.

Hawera & Normanby Star, Volume XLII, Issue 7383, 8 February 1902, Page 4 (Supplement)

HEALTH HINTS.

A WARNING TO LADIES.

Young persons, and especially young women who are particular about their personal appearance, are given to much worry over moles and similar facial blemishes, and often resort to severe applications in the hope of removing them. Inelr efforts are usually fruitless unless they employ a surgeon, who makes a clean and scientific incision. The danger of irritating these growths is not generally understood. Several cases are on record where accidental bruises have resulted in spreading the growth. In one instance cited by a medical contemporary the mole developed enormous spreading tendencies, covering the entire surface of the body, resulting finally in death. Physicians frequently warn their patients that such blemishes should not be interfered with, but rarely do they insist with sufficient earnestness. The fact is that a mole is a potential sarcoma and if disturbed at all should be completely removed.

A CHILD'S CRY.

In the first months^ of its existence a child has, as Tennyson said, "no language but a cry," a cry which to those ignorant or indifferent to children is simply meaningless or .irritating, but which to the trained ear tells much. A mother should at once set herself to study her child's cries and to understand them. This is neither hard nor difficult, and only implies that patience and watchfulness which every mother is in duty bound to ciiltivate. Taken with the expression of the child's face, the cause of a cry can always be detected from its tone. A sleepy cry is always njpre or less of a squeal; a hungry cry* is in short, dry sobs; while only sharp pain or extreme temper will bring a tear into a baby's eye. The cry of hunger can soon be appeased; that far more frequent cry from over-feeding or improper feeding is harder to treat. Immediate relief is often given by a little dill water mixed with a spoonful of hot water, or by laying the child on its face on your knee, with the pressure of its own weight on its digestive organs. Of one thing beware from the first — never give anything to a baby because it cries

AVOIDABLE CAUSES OF INDIGES-

TION.

In the present day almost twothirds of the "grown-ups" complain of indigestion, dyspepsia, or some such ailment, and even children do not seem free. As cold and digestive failure are the active "causes of most serious illnesses, this is a bad state of tnings, and a very needless one, since more than half of the indigestion is avoidable by simple obedience to wise laws of Nature. One avoTQable cause, especially with young men and boys, is rapid eating, swallowing food quite unmasticated. One of our longest lived and most physically fit statesman attributed his extraordinary health to this fact, that he had been trained as a child to give over fifty distinct bites to every piece of food before he swallowed it; and it is certainly a fact that those who do so are stronger and healthier, and eat much less than those who bolt unchewed food. Another less obvious but fruitful cause of indigestion is insufficient clothing; this especially in children and young people. Those warm cholera belts made and sent out to our troops in South Africa were an effort to meet the evil of having the organs in the lower part of the body chilled and injured. "Liver chills" cause more biliousness and acute indigestion than is imagined; and with ■women the desire to look slim has much to answer for. Woollen under garments instead of cotton are often all that is needed to keep the influenza fiend at bay.