Charles West

“ Let these suffice as samples of the men with whom Harvey was in daily intercourse. It would be easy enough, especially if one travelled beyond the somewhat narrow circle of those whose pursuits were exclusively connected with the profession of medicine, to swell the list of those remarkable alike for their genius and their culture, who were the inheritors of all that was most worth the possessing of that wonderful renaissance, that new birth of the world, out of which came alike the evil and the good of modern society. ”

“ It knows only that it suffers, it has been accustomed to have its will obeyed in everything, and cannot understand that its suffering is not at once taken away. It insists on getting up and on being dressed, or on lying in its mother's or nurse's lap, where the warmth of another person's body does but aggravate its fever; it screams with passion at the approach of the doctor, it will not allow itself to be examined, it will take no medicine; the doctor is powerless, the mother heart-broken. Sickness is not the time to exercise authority which has not been put in force before ”

“ They staid with all love and kindness, and moved up and down the paths of this work-a-day world as if they were quite unused to higher regions. Harvey seems, indeed, to have cared much for home friendships—for the love of his brothers, sisters, nephews, and nieces, to all of whom he bequeathed some remembrance, thoughtfully selected according to what would be of most service or give most pleasure. ”

“ CHAPTER II. THE GENERAL SIGNS OF DISEASE IN INFANCY AND CHILDHOOD.
The signs of disease at all ages may be referred to one or other of three great classes: disorder of function, alteration of temperature, complaint of pain.
In the infant it is the last of these which very often calls attention to the illness from which it is suffering. Cries are the only language which a young baby has to express its distress; as smiles and laughter and merry antics tell without a word its gladness. The baby must be ill, is all that its cries tell one person ”

“ If our view is obscured by any prejudice for or against this or that inference, which a fact seems to invalidate or to support, or even if the hues of religious sentiment are allowed to intervene and colour it, we see indistinctly and judge wrongly. It is only the Lumen siccum, the pure light of passionless intellect, which shows things truly and distorts them by no refraction. It is thus only that we can enquire into the truths written by God’s own finger on the world, and on all that inhabit it. ”

“ Idiocy.—In idiocy, however, there is much more than the mere arrest of the intellect at any period. The idiot of eight years old does not correspond in his mental development to the child at six, or four, or two; his mind is not only dwarfed but deformed; while feebleness of will is often as remarkable as mere deficiency of power of apprehension. Even in earliest infancy there is usually a something in the child idiotic from birth which marks him as different from babies of his own age. ”

“ Such was the man, such were his pursuits; loving knowledge for its own sake, loving it too not in pride of intellect, but in humility of heart, believing that it, like every good and perfect gift, cometh down from above from the Father of lights; and his longing for it seems to have become stronger as he grew older. ”

“ Some persons have an impression that there is something specially shameful in scrofulous disease, and while they will readily admit the existence of a consumptive tendency in their family, they almost resent the suggestion that their child's ailment is scrofulous. For this prejudice there is absolutely no foundation. There is no more reason for connecting scrofula in a child with any antecedent wrong-doing on the part of its progenitors, than there is for attaching that idea to the red hair or black eyes which a child may have in common with the rest of its family. ”

“ But even for those who are not able to subscribe to Pascal’s creed, there is yet enough in all the changes of scientific theory and opinion to lead them when doing battle for some hypothesis that may seem opposed to old beliefs, to bear in mind that after all they may be mistaken, that the ancient creed may have more truth in it than seems. I know of no more wholesome state of mind for the investigation of truth than the ever-present consciousness of the possibility of error. ”

“ What wonder is it that in such circumstances the body should waste most rapidly; for it is forced from its own tissues to supply those elements essential to the maintenance of life, which its food contains in far too scanty a proportion. Every [Pg 48] organ of the body contributes to the general support, and life is thus prolonged, if no kind disease curtail it, until each member has furnished all that it can spare, and then death takes place from starvation, its approach having been slower, but the suffering which preceded it not therefore less, than if all food had been withheld. ”

“ Not only is the mind of the child feebler in all respects than that of the adult, but, in proportion to the feebleness of his reasoning power, there is an exaggerated activity of his perceptive faculties, a vividness of his imagination. The child lives at first in the external world, as if it were a part of himself, or he a part of it, and the gladheartedness which it rejoices us to see is as much a result of the vividness with which he realises the things around him, as of that absence of care to which it is often attributed. ”

“ So long as we do not deify human intellect, every triumph that it achieves enriches all; and it is as proud a thing for us to be able to claim citizenship with Newton or with Bacon as with Wellington or with Nelson. Nor is this all, but in Harvey’s time the manner in which he conducted his enquiries was in its teachings of value little less than was the result at which he arrived. ”

“ She must be content to see the infant turn from her to the nurse with whose face it has all its life been familiar; or to hear the little one tell her to go away, for her presence is associated with none of those 'familiar acts, made beautiful by love,' which win the young heart: the mother is but a stranger who brings no help, who relieves no distress. Happy such a mother if she has found a conscientious and intelligent nurse to whom she can delegate her office ”

“ But our profession gives us, in its daily exercise, the solution of the problem. We have to do with the spoilt, not with the perfect; the meaning presses on us; we find it in a brief sentence, half of which most are ready to utter with reverence, ‘Deus qui humanæ substantiæ dignitatem mirabiliter condidisti;’ ‘God who in creating human nature didst wonderfully dignify it;’ but two words are still wanting to complete it, ‘et mirabilius reformasti,’ ‘and hast still more wonderfully renewed it.’ These solve the otherwise insoluble equation, these give the answer to the enigma. ”

“ In cases so slight it is no easy matter to recognise the features of a highly dangerous disease; still, out of forerunners so trivial as these, croupal symptoms may be developed, and their advances may be most insidious, and unless both parents and doctor have been closely on the watch they may be surprised all at once by the breathing suddenly becoming very laboured, by that and the cough becoming attended by the sounds characteristic of croup, and by the child's life being in extreme jeopardy, or in danger even beyond the hope of recovery. ”

“ The hasty traveller, indeed, who stops for an hour or two on his way to Venice to take a hurried glance at the chapel of Giotto scarcely dreams as he treads the grass-grown streets of the deserted city,
‘Where wasteful time debateth with decay,’
how large a space Padua has filled in the intellectual life of Europe. [13] And yet it was once a university with 18,000 students; a true republic of letters, and a republic of most democratic kind. The Professors, originally elected by the students, were in Harvey’s time still nominated by the University. ”

“ It is, therefore, not difficult to understand how, when the circulation is in a state of permanent excitement, a very slight cause may suffice to overturn its equilibrium, and occasion a greater flow of blood to the brain than the organ is able to bear. Congestion of the brain, however, is not by any means limited to this season, but may occur at other times without any obvious exciting cause, and with no other explanation than is furnished by the well-known fact that all periods of development such as childhood, are periods during which the growing organs are most apt to become disordered. ”

“ Often a child objects to stop all day in its little cot, but move it to its mother's or nurse's big bed; and with a large tray of toys before it, and a little of the tact which love teaches, the day will pass in unclouded content and cheerfulness. ”

“ All food has to answer two distinct purposes: the one to furnish materials for the growth of the body, the other to afford matter for the maintenance of its temperature; and life cannot be supported except on a diet in which the elements of nutrition and those of respiration bear a certain proportion to each other. Now, in milk, the proper food of infants, the elements of the former are to those of the latter about in the proportion of 1 to 2, while in arrowroot, sago, and tapioca they are only as 1 to 26, and in wheaten flour only as 1 to 7. ”

“ Or, at other times, its spirits are very variable; it will sometimes cease suddenly in the midst of its play, and run to hide its head in its mother's lap, putting its hands to its head, and complaining of headache, or saying merely that it is tired and sleepy, and wants to go to bed. Sometimes, too, it will turn dizzy, as you will know, not so much from its complaint of dizziness as from its suddenly standing still, gazing around for a moment as if lost, and then either beginning to cry at the strange sensation, or seeming to awake from a reverie, and at once returning to its play. ”

“ Unfortunately, it is so much easier to give cod-liver oil and iron than to turn the best spare room into a night nursery, and to uglify the cot by taking away the curtains which made it so pretty, and to give up some of the pleasures of society in order to superintend the preparation of the baby's food; that the doctor is called in to correct by drugs the evil which drugs cannot reach. Iron and cod-liver oil are very useful in the second place; fresh air, good ventilation, and a wise diet must always occupy the first. ”

“ The want of breath puts the respiratory muscles into play: the man takes a deep inspiration, and by this unconscious effort, he overcomes the resistance of the chest and the elasticity of the lungs. The new-born infant feels the same want and makes the same effort; but its muscular power is small, and its inspirations are often so feeble as to draw the air in some parts only into the larger tubes, while many of the smaller remain undilated, and much of the lung continues in the state in which it was before birth. ”

“ So soon as the child has been taught at home to exercise these lower powers, and the question of what is termed its education arises, it is a matter of absolute necessity that he be sent to an institution specially set apart for the feeble-minded. It is absolutely impossible with the most devoted love and the most lavish expenditure of money, to do at home what can be, and is constantly, accomplished even in a pauper idiot asylum. ”