FEVER
Children get fever very easily—the digestive disturbance of overeating, constipation, a slight bilious attack—all produce fever which disappears quite as suddenly as it came. The first thing to do under such circumstances is to withhold food, give plenty of water to drink, produce a brisk movement of the bowel by giving a dose of castor oil, give a cleansing enema, and treat the fever as follows:
After removing all of the clothes from the child, place him in a warm blanket and then prepare a sponge bath which may be equal parts of alcohol and water; expose one portion of the body at a time and apply the water and alcohol first to one arm and then to the other arm, the chest, one leg, the other leg, the back and then the buttocks. Do not dry the part but allow evaporation to take place, and this, accompanied by the cooling of the blood which is brought to the skin by the friction, readily reduces the fever. Another procedure which may be employed if the fever registers high is the wet-sheet pack which is administered as follows:
Three thicknesses of wool blankets are placed on the bed and a sheet as long as the baby and just enough to wrap around him once, is wrung out of cool water and spread over these blankets. With a hot-water bottle to the feet, the child is then laid down in the wet sheet which is now brought in contact with every portion of his body, then the blankets are quickly brought around, and he is allowed to warm up the sheet—which lowers his temperature.
Another valuable procedure is the cooling enema. Water the same temperature as that of the body, is allowed to enter the bowel and is then quickly cooled down to 90 or 85 F.; in this manner much heat is taken out of the body and the fever quickly reduced. (For further treatment of fevers see [Appendix].)
CHAPTER XXVI
BABY'S SICK ROOM
Visitors should never be allowed in the sick room during the height of a disease, and during convalescence not more than one visitor should be allowed at one time, and the visit then should be only two or three minutes in length. The order and the quietness and the system of the sick room should be perfect. Visitors and loitering members of the family do no good and they may do much harm to the recuperating nervous system of the child.