Then I came across an American article in which they recommended the giving of two doses of each potency of T.B. from the 1m to the cm – two of 1m, two of 10m, two of 50m, two of cm-and they gave these on successive days, two 1m one day, two 10m the next day, and so on. And they maintained that they got very much better results. I thin it is true. I tried it out in quite a number of cases, but I gave up the childrens Out-Patients before I had time to convince myself that it was better than the method I had carried out before. But the Americans claim that by that administration you can produce a practical immunity to T.B. in a child of T.B. parents.
Then there is one other point in which the treatment of children appears to differ from ordinary practice, and that applies particularly to the Calc. carb. child. If you get young children under two years of age, with definite Calc. carb. indications, I think that one tends to lose time by following the rule that we all observe in other cases of never repeating so long as the child is improving.
I know when I first started doing childrens Out-Patients a child would come with a definite Calc. carb. indications, and I would give a 0m of Calc. carb. and i couldnt find any reason for repeating under six months or so-the child was going straight ahead, slowly but steadily, there was no let- up in its improvements, and I simply went on giving Placebo. Then one day one of my friends came down to see the Out-Patient department, and watched the work that was being done. A child came along who had had nothing for three months, had had a 10m and then Placebo.
I said “it is still improving, what are we to do?” He said, “Yes, it is improving, but is it improving any more than any other child would at a post-natal clinic? You have dieted it; you have instructed the mother; is your Calcarea child doing better than any other well-fed child?” So, having done a good deal of child welfare work, I couldnt honestly say that the child was doing better than many children that I could duplicate the welfare centre who were having no Calcarea at all. It had jumped ahead the first month after its Calcarea, but after that went on much as other children in a welfare clinic.
So after that, in young children, I started giving Calc. carb. at much more frequent intervals; wherever I got a child who wasnt jumping ahead still, I repeated my Calcarea, and I think the point is this that the average young growing child, free from acute illness, will tend to improve, supposing you are doing nothing at all, and what your drug ought to be doing is increasing that improvement; so I think in many of these cases you hurry up your work, in dealing certainly with Calcarea children, if you are not satisfied to wait indefinitely before you repeat.
You see what I mean-it is different from where you have got an adult who is stationary; here you have got a growing, developing child who is going to improve apart from acute illness, and in a case of that sort you can repeat much more frequently than you would in the ordinary static adult case.
No.2.
YOU remember last week I more or less completed the first group of the drugs which one commonly finds indicated in children, and you said that you would like the others done in much the same way.
Well, if you glance at the list of drugs I gave you as forming the second group you will notice that they are all very much the same type of child, and they all apply more or less to the backward kind of kid, either purely delayed development, or the definitely mental defective. These are what I am trying to cover in this second group of drugs; and, of course, the outstanding drug in that group is BARYTA CARB. which has got more of the backward child than any other drug in our Materia Medica.
The characteristics of the Baryta carb. child are very definite I think the easiest way to get hold of it is to have a clear idea in your minds that here you have got a dwarfish child, dwarfish mentally and dwarfish physically. I have never seen a Baryta carb. child who was up to standard height. I have seen them up to standard weight. And the next glaring characteristic when you see them is that you always in the Baryta carb. child have got an excessively shy child; and that shy characteristic covers quite a lot of the Baryta carb. child.
It is nervous of strangers; it is scared of being left alone; very often it is terrified of going out of doors; a town bred child going to the country is terrified in the open fields. They often get night terrors, without any clear idea of what the terror is. And they always have a fear of people. There is another characteristic you can link on to that fear of people, and that is the Baryta carb. kids are always touchy; they dont like being interfered with; they are very easily irritated. Then the next thing that you will always get in them is that throughout their lives they have been late in everything-late in speaking, late in walking, late in dentition, slow in gaining weight.
Then, the next marked feature of them is their exaggeration of the normal childs forgetfulness. Every child is forgetful, every child is inattentive, but the Baryta carb. child has that very much exaggerated. If they are playing they never stick to it for any length of time, they pick up a toy, play with it, and drop it; you may get their attention for a minute or two, then they turn round and look at the nurse or mother or whoever happens to be there.
They pick up a thing from your desk and fumble with it for a minute or two, and the next moment they are playing with the handle of a drawer. It is that lack of concentration that is the outstanding characteristic. As they get older you get the same report from the school-the child is inattentive, never concentrates on a lesson, appears to learn to-day and has completely forgotten it to-morrow. The mother would teach the child its alphabet a dozen times over, and apparently ten minutes afterwards it knew it, it would be allowed to go out and play and half an hour later it had all gone.
The next thing about them-and it is one of the things you would expect with that type of child-is that they are very easily tired out; any attempt at systematic effort exhausts them. When they are young they become cross and irritable, as they get older any systematic effort and they get very troublesome headaches- usually a frontal headache with a feeling as if their forehead was bulgy and sitting right down over their eyes, and it is an awful labour for them to keep their eyes open.
Then the next point about them-and it is pretty constant to all the Baryta carb. kids-is that they are very liable to get colds. Their colds are fairly characteristic; they always start as a sore throat,and I do not think I have ever seen a Baryta carb. child that hadnt hypertrophied tonsils.
Then, with the hypertrophy of their tonsils you can link on the other glandular tissues; the Baryta carb. child very probably has enlarged cervical glands, possibly enlarged abdominal glands. With the enlarged abdominal glands you link up that the kid stands badly, there is often marked lordosis and a very prominent abdomen. Then again, with the abdominal condition you link up the symptom that the Baryta carb. kid is usually worse after eating-more inattentive, more irritable, more touchy, and very often more tired after eating.
The next thing about them is-you link this on to the tonsillar hypertrophy-if they do get enlarged tonsils and do get cold they are very liable to run to a quinsy. And there is another tip there that is worth remembering; if you get a typical Baryta carb. kid who has got an acute tonsillitis you are wiser to give a dose of Baryta mur., rather than Baryta carb., during the acute phase; and very often you will want an intercurrent dose of Psorinum after your Baryta mur. before you go back to your Baryta carb.
And it is quite easy to tack on the Psorinum to the Baryta carb. because many of these Baryta carb. kids tend to get a crusty skin eruption on the head, they very often have crusty margins to the eyelids, they may have a definite blepharitis, and most of the Baryta carb. kids are worse from washing-all definite Psorinum symptoms also.
Another point about them-and you tack that on to their skins-is they are very liable to get intensely irritable skin eruptions, very often without very much eruption but with intense irritation, and that again is liable to be worse after they have been bathed.
As you would expect with that type of child with low physique, they are chilly, and if they are exposed to cold they are liable to get their tonsils affected.
Well, that is the keynote to the mentally defective group of drugs, and, as I say, that is by far the commonest. By following on that you get the other drugs that I mentioned, starting off with Borax.
Well, in BORAX I think that the thing that begins to make you query whether a child is a Baryta carb. or a Borax child is the manner in which the Borax child is frightened. They are both scared children; them are very often quite similar to look at; but you will find that, whereas in the Baryta carb. child it is anything strange in its surroundings which terrifies it, in the Borax child it is any sudden noise in its vicinity. Any sudden noise in the vicinity of a Borax child simply terrifies it.
