Sulphur. The child does not take its usual long sleep; it awakes often. The general appearance of the child indicates Sulphur.
Sulphuric acid. The mouth a appears very painful; and the child is very weak. Ecchymoses.
Pure molasses, applied by means of a piece of muslin, or linen, or by the finger, constitutes the best (healing) wash, where one seems to be needed.
CONSTIPATION.
Even very young infants are sometimes affected with Constipation; in fact during the first two months of infantile life, constipation is frequent, while diarrhoea is comparatively rare. This may be occasioned by some hereditary predisposition, and be maintained by the constantly imparted influence of a costive habit on the part of the nursing mother.
In most cases of infantile constipation, the difficulty consists, so far as the child is concerned, in an inactive state of the bowel. Some mothers are in the habit of relieving this by the stimulating irritation of a roll of paper or other small object, anointed with lard and introduced within the rectum. The employment of purgatives of any kind, as indeed in all other forms of constipation, is worse than useless. In some cases the constipation may be due to functional derangement of the liver, as in children affected with jaundice, where the stools may be hard, dry and clay-colored, showing a deficiency in the secretion of the bile.
There are also cases of complete inaction of the bowel and retention of the feces from birth, which are due to imperfect development, or actual malformation of the intestine. In these cases the rectum maybe perfect, but with its canal closed by a false membrane which obstructs it either at its orifice or higher up in the intestine; or the canal of the rectum may be obliterated for a greater or less extent by the adhesion of its opposite sides. These cases may be relieved by a very simple incision, where the hard and protruding accumulation of feces furnishes a sure guide to the guide to the operator. ( See cases of this kind reported in the American Journal of Homoeopathy, for 1854, p. 16, vol. viii.) But there are other and more complicated varieties of malformation, such as those in which the natural aperture of the bowel is absent, and the intestine terminates by opening into the urethra, bladder or vagina; or those in which the intestinal canal is not only malformed but altogether absent for an extent more or less considerable. All such cases require in their treatment no small amount of surgical skill; and the particular directions for the operations they involve will be found in the best works on practical surgery; or better still in West’s recent and elaborate Treatise on Diseases of Children.
In the medical treatment of the constipation of infants, recourse must always be had to the cause; if this is found in the nursing mother, the proper remedies should first be administered to her. Should there be any thing in her diet, such as the use of coffee, which may be capable of rendering either herself or her babe constipated, this also should be attended to. With scarcely a single exception, case of costiveness in nursing infants will be found dependent upon the influence of its diet; hereditary and constitutional weakness and inaction of the bowel; or actual derangement of the liver. The remedy should, however, be selected in accordance with all the symptoms; a single dose administered, and allowed entirely to exhaust itself before either repeating it, or making a new prescription.
Aconite. Much heat about the child’s head; it is feverish; sleepless, restless; gnaws its first; and its stools are hard and difficult.
Alumina. There seems to be a want of action in the rectum; the child has to make a very great effort, even for a soft stool.
Bryonia. The stools are very dry, as if burnt, and of a dark color; dry lips and mouth.
Calcarea c. Hard, undigested stools of a light color.
Graphites. The stools are of an uncommon size, very large; and the child has more or less humid eruption over its body, behind its ears, in its face, on the chin, in its groins. This eruption exudes a watery, transparent, gelatinous fluid.
Lycopodium. Red, sandy, urine the sand is seen in the diaper; much flatulence; difficult stools, which it is almost impossible to evacuate.
Mercurius. When the general symptoms of mercury are present; salivation, sore throat, glandular swellings, frequent efforts to evacuate; all these symptoms become more prominent every time the child takes cold.
Nitric acid. This remedy cures many cases where the pain of evacuating is great during and after the passage, as though the little sufferer had fissures of the anus. See Fissures of the Anus, page 414.
Nux v. Stools large and difficult, or small, frequent and painful, with much colic. When the nurse takes much coffee, or highly seasoned food. The child is quite sleepless and restless.
Opium. The stools occur in hard round black balls.
Platina. The stools adhere to the rectum and anus like soft clay, so that it is difficult to discharge them.
Plumbum. The stools are composed of conglomerate balls, like sheep’s manure.
Sepia. The stools are very difficult to discharge; they seem to remain in the lower part of the rectum, and to require the assistance of the nurse in order to facilitate their discharge.
Silicea. The stools are with difficulty forced to the verge of the anus, when they slip back again.
Sulphur. The child has intertrigo, pimply eruptions; swelling of its skin; soreness of the anus, so that it screams with every attempt to evacuate the bowels, it seems to have piles.
Veratrum. There seems to be a paralyzed condition of the rectum, requiring much straining when a cold sweat appears on the forehead.
DIARRHOEA.
This symptom, for infantile diarrhoea can hardly be termed a distinct disease, a constitutes one of the most frequent and serious of all that occur in infancy land childhood. Of itself alone diarrhoea does not often prove directly fatal; but its long continuance seriously weakens the patient and endangers the health; and it constitutes, moreover, a very grave complication of other forms of disease.
Diarrhoea may appear without fever, or other constitutional disorder; this is usually termed by medical writers simple or catarrhal diarrhoea. Or it may be accompanied by more or less fever; then properly termed inflammatory diarrhoea; this may become an actual dysentery or inflammation of the bowels. In its mildest forms, infantile diarrhoea corresponds exactly to the easy and painless vomiting already described as the means by which the overloaded stomach relieves itself. This may be either a lienteria, in which the food passes undigested; or a diarrhoea crapulosa, in which the excess of food mixed with feces is passed in large and frequent quantities. Or again, as is still oftener the case, the diarrhoea may be of a purely mucous character; a condition which results from disordered (excessive) action of the gastro-intestinal muciparous glands and follicles. In this latter from, the mucus designed to facilitate the digestive process is secreted in such abundant quantity and in such altered quality, that it exerts an influence entirely different. For this primary derangement of the muciparous glands, by sympathy affects all the neighboring organs of the gastro- intestinal tract, whose secretions are intended to promote the accomplishment of the function of digestion. In some instances this mucous diarrhoea seems to becomes real blennorrhoea, or catarrhal of the bowel. This form may arise from cold and dampness; from careless exposure, and from want of sufficient covering over the abdomen.
The causes of the principal forms of diarrhoea may be arranged under three general heads. I. Those which are connected with the organism itself; II. Those which depend upon the quantity and quality of the food; III. Those connected with atmospheric influences, and changes in the weather.
I. The diarrhoeas which from interior causes, are such as those just described as catarrhal, arising from excessive action of the muciparous glands. To this form of diarrhoea many children are so remarkably predisposed, that the slightest change of weather or personal exposure renders them subject to it. The extraordinary activity of the whole digestive apparatus in young babes, renders the access of diarrhoea of some kind, the almost inevitable result of the irritability induced by the process of dentition. And in addition to these it should be borne in mind, that the changes taking place in all parts of the alimentary canal and of its dependencies, in order to fit them for the proper reception of the varied food upon which the infant will soon have to subsist, cannot but render these organs still more susceptible to this form of disorder. The change which takes place in the mouth during the period of location, is exactly equalled by a corresponding change in the organs of digestion and assimilation Hence it happens that very few children entirely escape the attack of diarrhoea in their first dentition; while one third, at least under the ordinary, Allopathic treatment, suffer from it severely.
