Volume 1

Pediatrics : the hygienic & medical treatment of children / by Thomas Morgan Rotch.

  • Rotch, T. M. (Thomas Morgan), 1849-1914.
Date:
1896
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Pediatrics : the hygienic & medical treatment of children / by Thomas Morgan Rotch. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    18 to the special disease as to the special group of symptoms brought about by the age ot the individual and the phase of its development. In studying, then, the different stages of development in children, we are in reality acquiring an alphabet, which when once thoroughly mastered will enable us to read the otherwise obscure language presented to us for translation by the various diseases of early life. The proper method of learning to understand sick infants and children is first to notice their peculiarities in health and to follow these peculiarities through the different stages of their development up to puberty. Thus, a pulse which would indicate an abnormal condi- tion in the adult, or a convulsion which would be of serious import in the older subject, may often be but physiological or of slight consequence in the child. In fact, there are a large number of physiological and anatomical truths concerning the young the knowledge of which will simplify to a great degree otherwise almost insurmountable difficulties in diagnosis. The. lack of this preliminary training, this alphabet, places the student who is endeavoring to understand diseases in children, in the position of attempt- ing to read without having first learned his letters. It is our province in this course of lectures to begin with the human being at birth, to study it as it is presented to us in the early hours of life, and to follow it in its develop- ment during the periods of infancy and childhood up to the age of puberty. It then approaches so nearly in its development to the adult that its diseases assume the type of adolescence, and your studies carry you into the province of general clinical medicine. For purposes of simplicity, we speak of infants and children, the anatomical and physiological conditions being sufficiently apparent to warrant this distinction between them. 1 he period of infancy is usually spoken of as covering about the first two years of life. Its most distinctive features are presented in the first twelve months, the second yeai, month by month, rapidly approaching the conditions which exist in child- hood. The second year, however, is influenced to such a degree by the various growing functions and tissues that its picture both in health and in disease resembles more closely the infant than the child. Childhood is empirically reckoned from the end of infancy to puberty, or the beginning of adolescence. A distinction must be made between the sexes, the girl becoming a fully-developed woman some years before the boy becomes a man. The age of puberty is usually reckoned as beginning from the twelfth to the fourteenth year. Much latitude as to age, however, must be given for the special idiosyncrasy of the individual, and also for the climate, as it has been found that children who live m a warm climate arrive at the age of puberty much earlier than those who are exposed to the lower ranges of temperature. In taking the period of birth as a start- ing-point for our studies we must not overlook the fact that it is simply a stao-e of development with which we are dealing, and not a peifectec lem . The better, therefore, you understand the evolution of the embryo to t ie infant, the better will you be prepared to appreciate the evolution of the infant to the child and of the child to the adult. It is especially impoitant