OUR BABIES.

Waipa Post, Volume IV, Issue 199, 28 March 1913, Page 3

OUR BABIES.

By Hygeia. Now, let us turn to what Dr Moynihan (the leading English authority of the clay on the surgical aspect of intestinrl 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. 1 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 to do anything but this, the most disastrous thing of all. “ The outset of sudden intense pain in the belly is Nature’s special danger signal 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 be 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-aisc, nor any other symptom whatever. The pain is absolutely abrupt in onset. It may be rapidly followed bv

shivering, sharp rise of temperature, vomiting, diarrhoea, etc.”

What does the mother do in such a case ? Having jumped to the con- | elusion that the child lias been eating j green fruit, or other indigestible food, she flies to the castor oil bottle. The proper treatment is absolute starvation, even water being given sparingly, if at all, until the doctor arrives. The child should be put to bed and hot formentations 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 befor the doctor arrives on the scene. Castor oil does not cure constipation, but makes it worse.