Many babes keep their mouths firmly shut against rubbing intruders, and, as if to surprise one, open the mouth to cry, and display quite a row of pearly teeth. Healthy, well-developed children generally have all their first teeth by the third year. Backward or rachitic children often have none at that age. I am acquainted with several apparently robust persons who never had all of their first teeth, and who are now probably past the age to get them.
After the first teeth are through, precaution is necessary to preserve them. They should be kindly looked after each day, any foreign particles removed, and the teeth wiped with a wet cloth. No hot or exceedingly cold, sour, hard, or brittle substances should be allowed to be bitten on, as they are easily broken. A snagged-tooth child looks almost as repulsive as a snagged-tooth man or woman. If people will let their children go around, as in midsummer they frequently do, with bare feet on the cold sidewalk, or with wet feet from having waded in every accessible puddle of water, while getting their grinders, they should not wonder at the great number of deaths under four years old. For thus, many, besides suffering greatly with pain from teething, take cold, which may develop in lung fever. Hardly any one says, “My child died from exposure while teething.” Nay, but pneumonia sets in, and the teething has to bear the blame. The primary cause is overshadowed by the probable secondary cause of death. If the first teeth are well cared for, all decaying ones removed in good season, the foundation of a handsome, permanent set will be sure, there being no constitutional diseases of the teeth themselves.
Loose, aching teeth are no less annoying to children than to adults, and it is cruel to force them to endure the pain when a few cents paid out to a dentist would remove it at once. Uneven, overlapped, inverted, projecting, and anomalous teeth are nearly all occasioned by neglecting to remove the milk teeth in proper time. Usually the application of the dental forceps is no more dreaded than the linen thread.
It is a mistake to suppose that children must have sore ears, eyes, mouth, nose, head, or some sickening eruption of the skin while teething. On the contrary, it has been clearly proved that too much heat and uncleanliness are the chief causes of these repulsive troubles. If sores or pimples do appear at times, they can with propriety be washed often with warm water, anointed with cold cream, till well; or, if there are bleeding pimples, sprinkling the parts, after washing each day, with calcined magnesia and elm flour, in equal quantities, will soon effect a cure. Babes whose scalps are well cleaned at birth seldom, if ever, have sore head. There is not the slightest danger of giving the child cold by cleaning it off as fast as possible, when discovered. I have frequently seen little three-year-old ones playing about with not only a sore patch full of greasy dirt on their scalp, but a filthy-looking cap, called a tar cap; in this way they have been kept till the hair-tubes were as completely destroyed as if the head had been scalded. It is not very encouraging to know that the great wisdom which prompts people to do, or persist in having done, these mischievous things, is never sufficient to find the remedy for the injury done. Whenever scurf does form on the head, it may be removed by applying sweet oil; should there be disposition to matter, a wash, made by boiling burdock root in water,—say half an ounce to a pint,—applied once or twice a day, is cleansing. To heal a healthy scalp sore, red oak bark, steeped in water,—say half an ounce to a quart,—makes a good wash. Sometimes the cure is very tedious; but, with due patience, all will be well.
When children get so that they can nibble, it is not a good plan to begin putting candies and knick-knacks in their hands as a play-rule; for this habit induces, to a certainty, all the unpleasant symptoms attendant upon indigestion; the most marked of which, in children, is unrest, fretfulness, loss of eye-sight, loss of teeth, and dwarfed statures. I take pleasure in recommending the following as a healthy, desirable kind of biscuit for children: Take one teacupful each of wheat and Graham or Indian corn-meal; one half cup of brown sugar or molasses; half teaspoonful of salt; mix with warm milk, knead well, cut into medium size cracker form, and bake quickly. They are nice, and should be eaten at regular meal times, dry, or crumbed in milk-and-water tea. Milk should never be withheld from children on a pretext of being feverish.
CHAPTER XVIII.
COMPLICATIONS OF TEETHING WITH DISEASES.
Diarrhœa is the most common trouble during the teething period, and is deserving of the most generous treatment. Should the food seem to disturb the stomach and pass away undigested, or in pieces, with some degree of sourness, the pulverized magnesia in from three to five-grain doses, once or twice a day, will correct it; after which gum-water, or milk, made like gruel, with flour, should be the chief diet till relieved. No fresh fish or eggs should be allowed in time of diarrhœa. Should the discharges continue, frequent drinks of a decoction of blackberry or raspberry leaves, or what is just as well, the juice of those ripe fruits, may be given in spoonful-doses. Also the fine lean corned beef, rolled or pounded fine and fed slowly in small quantities—say a tablespoonful during the day—will frequently arrest the whole trouble; emptiness, it will be remembered, being an exciting cause of diarrhœa as much as overfeeding. There will be emptiness if a continual nibbling is allowed, with the smallest chance of ever getting a substantial meal. Usually, in the diarrhœa of teething, there is great thirst, which may best be abated by giving plentifully of thin, cool gum-arabic water, no sugar. It is this everlasting sugar sweetening that creates fermentation at such times. It is the over-indulgence in objectionable food that causes much of the bowel complaint in teething, rather than the teething itself. We are aware that the pain caused by a coming tooth is annoying, yet this is no reason why children cannot be kindly prohibited from grasping and tasting everything they seem to see or cry for. Children are very sensitive to odors, therefore cooking and eating should be done as remote from them as possible. In this matter, however, many of the laboring classes and indigent are deserving of sympathy; being either from choice, or ill-fortune, huddled together in close tenements, where each can smell what the other is cooking. And it is next to impossible for them to better the future condition or prospects of their offspring while continuing to live so. It may not be unprofitable to insert here what I have frequently suggested as a sanitary measure: that is, for families to make it a rule not to occupy the last room at the top of the house, even for storing goods; as carpets, trunks, hanging garments or curtains, and bedding catch and retain the odors ascending from below. Smoke, gases, dusts, breaths of inmates, steam, the odors arising from old drains, or fever patients, all go to the top of a building, and if there is no outlet it must stop there and endanger the health of persons occupying it. By leaving one room vacant, a window in it could be continually open and no one would suffer from bad air. A skylight in the roof would answer the same purpose, but these are scarcely ever opened.
WHOOPING-COUGH.
Frequently when whooping-cough intervenes during the time of teething, the irritation of the gums somewhat abates. Some children have whooping-cough and diarrhœa for some length of time, and upon recovery, show quite a number of teeth. I am not all in favor of encouraging any increased discharge from the bowels, but sometimes in congestive whooping-cough a little looseness is beneficial. Cholera often sets in just as the teeth have begun to break through the gums. The treatment, however, should be the same as if not teething. Great caution should be observed not to administer drugs containing laudanum; for by so doing, air and mucus collect in the air or bronchial tubes, inducing a stoppage in the breathing. Possibly suffocation and death have resulted from this cause in numbers of cases. Whooping-cough, if gently treated, seldom, if ever, proves fatal. I have had patients under my charge with it from four weeks old, upwards. It would, nevertheless, be well to keep the tender infant from exposure to whooping-cough for a while. It does seem as if sooner or later in life we are to encounter these peculiar complaints. The main thing to do to relieve the force of whooping-cough is to keep the chest and air-tubes warm, and, most of the time, moist. If there is danger of congestion, a warm poultice of flaxseed meal spread over the chest and throat, and keeping clear of dust, smoke, or smells of any kind, will aid much. By all means the nose should be kept running, which may be done by sweating the forehead and nose. Bronchitis or wheezing, like whooping-cough, is a disease that affects the air-tubes in a greater or less degree, the inflammation sometimes becoming very distressing. The treatment should be about the same as for whooping-cough.