I have seen infants suffering with diarrhea or summer complaint, sleepless, worrying, fretting, or crying from thirst, begging for water, and the mother or nurse afraid to give it more than a teaspoonful or two at a time, saying that it vomited everything it drank as soon as taken. I have often, when visiting such cases, called for a glass of cold water, and, to the surprise of the mother, would allow it to take all it could drink, which usually would be retained, and the child would soon be wrapped in a refreshing sleep. Without medicine, a proper regulation of the child's diet would soon restore it to health again.
The spasms of children, from whatever causes, or the eclampsia from uræmic poisoning, are often readily controlled when immersed in hot water or given a hot vapor bath or corn sweat. If the convulsions of children are accompanied by a high temperature, put them into water of 100° and then gradually cool it down to 68° or 70°, and then keep them in a room of the same temperature, with little covering. If the temperature rises, repeat the treatment as frequently as necessary, and I think you will not be disappointed in the results.
Scarlet fever and diphtheria, two of the most dreaded and formidable diseases of children, are largely shorn of their terrors when, in addition to an early and thorough medicinal treatment, the little patients are bathed in as warm water as the surface will allow frequently, or for thirty minutes wrapped in a warm, wet blanket, followed by warm, dry coverings, to maintain the perspiration that such treatment usually produces. It has proved to me a valuable aid in eliminating from the blood the specific poison which causes these diseases, and I can safely recommend it to your notice and trial.
There is no disease more favorably influenced by this treatment than pneumonia, and in mild cases one daily warm bath or sweat, without medicine, will be sufficient to arrest this disease, and it is among the first things I usually order. If I find a child or infant with a temperature of 103° to 105°, short, dry, and painful cough, dyspnoea, rapid pulse, great thirst, or vomiting, with dry crepitation in any part of the lung tissue, I order it rolled up in a blanket or sheet coming out of hot water, and in thirty minutes change it to warm, dry blankets, and soon the little fretful, worrying sufferer would rest in a quiet, peaceful sleep.--_Peoria Med. Mo._