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; and, not once but many times, I
have watched, a sad spectator, the death of children from an illness not
necessarily fatal, but rendered so because it was impossible to learn
the progress of disease, impossible to administer the necessary
remedies.

_What a child has been made when well, such it will be when sick._

One more point I must insist on before going into details, and that is
as to the necessity of perfect truthfulness in dealing with sick
children. The foolish device of telling a child when ill, that the
doctor who has been sent for is its uncle or its cousin, is the outcome
of the still more foolish falsehood of threatening the child with the
doctor's visit if it does not do this or that. No endeavour should be
spared by nurse or parent, or by the doctor himself, to render his visit
popular in the nursery. Three-fourths of the difficulties which attend
the administration of medicine are commonly the result of previous bad
management of the child, of foolish over-indulgence, or of still more
foolish want of truthfulness. It may answer once to tell a child that
medicine is nice when really it is nasty, but the trick will scarcely
succeed a second time, and the one success will increase your
difficulties ever after. If medicine is absolutely necessary, and the
child is too young to understand reason, it must be given by force, very
firmly but very kindly, and the grief it occasions will be forgotten in
an hour or two. If he is old enough, tell him that the medicine is
ordered to do him good, and firmness combined with gentleness will
usually succeed in inducing him to take it. The advantage of perfect
truthfulness extends to every incident in the illness of children, even
to the not saying, 'Oh, you will soon be well,' if it is not likely so
to be. If children find you never deceive them, how implicitly they will
_trust_ you, what an infinity of trouble is saved, and how much rest of
mind is secured to the poor little sufferer!

A little boy three years old was ordered to be c