This is no disease, to be treated with the grey powder and the castor oil wherewith the over-busy monthly nurse is always ready. It is a natural process, which the intelligent may watch with interest, with which none but the ignorant will try to interfere.
There is, however, beside this a real jaundice, in which the skin is more deeply stained, the whites of the eyes are yellow, the urine high-coloured, and in which the dark evacuations that carry away the contents of the bowels before birth are succeeded by white motions, from which the bile is absent. This condition is not very usual, save where children have been exposed to cold, or where the air they breathe is unwholesome. Of this no better proof can be given than is afforded by the fact that in the Dublin Lying-in Hospital, where the children are defended with the greatest care both from cold and from a vitiated atmosphere, infantile jaundice is extremely rare, while it attacks three-fourths of the children received into the Foundling Hospital of Paris. Still it does sometimes occur when yet no cause can be assigned for it, and it is noteworthy that it is sometimes met with in successive infants in the same family.
As the respiratory function and that of the skin increase in activity, the jaundice will disappear of its own accord. Great attention must be paid during its continuance to avoid exposure of the child to cold, while no other food than the mother's milk should be given. If the bowels are at all constipated, half a grain of grey powder or a quarter of a grain of calomel may be given, followed by a small dose of castor oil, and the aperient will often seem to hasten the disappearance of the jaundice; but in a large number of cases even this amount of medical interference is not needed.
There is, indeed, a very grave form of jaundice, happily of excessive rarity, due to malformation of the liver, to absence or obstruction of the bile-ducts, and often accompanied with bleeding from the navel. I do but mention it; the intensity and daily deepening of the jaundice, the fruitlessness of all treatment, and the grave illness of the child, even though no bleeding should occur, render it impossible to confound this hopeless condition with the trivial ailment of which I have been speaking.
The next chapter will furnish a fitter place than the present for speaking fully of the Disorders of the Digestive Organs.
I will say now but this: that whatever a mother may do eventually, she avoids grave perils for herself by suckling her infant for the first month; while the health of her child, just launched upon the world, is terribly endangered if fed upon those substitutes for its proper nutriment on which after the lapse of a few weeks it may subsist, may even manage to thrive.
There are some local affections incident to the new-born child concerning which a few words may not be out of place; and first of the
Ophthalmia of New-born Children.—It is the cause of the loss of sight of nine-tenths of all persons who, among the poor, are said to have been born blind. In the wealthier classes of society it is comparatively rare, and seldom fails to meet with timely treatment, yet many people scarcely realise its dangerous character, or the extreme rapidity of its course.
It generally begins about the third day after birth with swelling of the lid of one or other eye, though both are soon involved. The eyelids swell rapidly, and if the affection is let alone, they soon put on the appearance of two semi-transparent cushions over the eyes. On separating the lids, which it is often very difficult to do owing to the spasmodic contraction of the muscles, their inner surface is seen to be enormously swollen, bright red, like scarlet velvet, bathed in an abundant yellowish thin secretion, which often squirts out in a jet as the lids are forcibly separated. Great care must be taken not to allow any of this fluid to enter the eye of a bystander, nor to touch his own eye until the fingers have been most carefully washed, since the discharge is highly contagious, and may produce most dangerous inflammation of the eyes of any grown person. The discharge being wiped or washed away, the eye itself may be seen at the bottom of the swelling very red, and its small vessels very blood-shot. By degrees the surface of the eye assumes a deeper red, it loses its brightness and its polish, while the swelling of the lids lessens, and they can be opened with less difficulty; their inner surface at the same time becomes softer, but thick and granular, and next the eyes themselves put on likewise a granular condition which obscures vision. The discharge by this time has become thicker and white, and looks like matter from an abscess. By slow degrees the inflammation may subside, the discharge lessen, the swelling diminish, and the eye in the course of weeks may regain its natural condition. But the danger is—and when proper treatment is not adopted early the danger is very great—lest the mischief should extend beyond the surface of the eye, lest ulceration of the eye should take place, the ulceration reach so deep as to perforate it, and not merely interfere with the sight, but destroy the organ of vision altogether.
In every instance, then, in which the eyelids of a new-born infant swell, or the slightest discharge appears from them, the attention of the doctor must at once be called to the condition. In the meantime, and during whatever treatment he may think it right to follow, the eye must be constantly covered with a piece of folded lint dipped in cold water; and every hour at least the eye must be opened and tepid water squeezed into it abundantly from a sponge held above, but not touching it, so as to completely wash away all the discharge. A weak solution of alum and zinc, as one grain of the latter to three of the former to an ounce of water, may in like manner be dropped from a large camel's-hair brush four times a day into the eye after careful washing. Simple as these measures are they yet suffice, if adopted at the very beginning, and carried on perseveringly, to entirely cure in a few days an ailment which if let alone leads almost always to most lamentable results.
I do not pursue the subject further, for bad cases require all the care of the most skilful oculist for their treatment.
Scalp Swellings.—Almost every new-born child has on one or other side of its head a puffy swelling, owing to the pressure to which the head has been subjected in birth, and this swelling disappears at the end of twenty-four or forty-eight hours.
Now and then, however, though indeed very seldom, the swelling does not disappear, but it goes on gradually increasing and becoming more definite in its outlines until at the end of three or four days it may be as big as half a small orange, or sometimes even larger, soft, elastic, painless, under the unchanged scalp, but presenting the peculiarity of having a hard raised margin with a distinct edge, which gives to the finger passed over it the sensation of a bony ridge, beyond which the bone seems deficient. This tumour is due usually to the same cause as that which produces the other temporary puffy swelling of the scalp, only the pressure having been more severe, blood has actually been forced out from the small vessels under the membrane which covers the skull, and hence its gradual increase, its definite outline; and hence, too, the bony ridge which surrounds it, and which is due to nature's effort at cure, in the course of which the raised edge of the membrane covering the skull (the pericranium) becomes converted into bone.
When the nature of these swellings was not understood, they used to be poulticed, and to be opened with a lancet to let out their contents. We know now, however, that we have nothing to do but to let them alone; that by degrees the blood will be absorbed and the tumour will disappear, and as it does so we may trace the gradual transformation of the membrane which covered it into bone, as we feel it crackling like tinsel under the finger. Two, three, or four weeks may be needed for the entire removal of one of these blood-swellings. The doctor will at once recognise its character, and you will then have nothing to do but to wait—often, unhappily, so much harder for the anxious mother than to meddle.
Ruptured Navel.—There is a period some time before the birth of a child when the two halves of its body are not united in front, as they become afterwards; and hare-lip or cleft-palate sometimes remains as the result of the arrest of that development which should have closed the fissured lip or united the two halves of the palate.
In a similar way it happens sometimes that though the skin is closed, the muscles of the stomach (or, more properly speaking, of the belly) are not in the close apposition in which they should be, so that the bowels are not supported