anticipated in
a former part of this book, especially with reference to the troubles of
digestion in infancy and early childhood. There is, indeed, but one form
of indigestion whose characters are so special as to require that I
should enter into any detail with reference to it.

=Dyspepsia of Weakly Children.=--Children from the age of about three to
ten years, whose health has been impaired by an attack of typhoid, or,
as it is commonly called, infantile remittent fever, or who belong to a
weakly family, or to one, some of whose members have shown a disposition
to consumptive disease, are sometimes martyrs to indigestion. It does
not need with them any special error of diet, or any casual exposure to
cold to disorder their digestion; but every two or three weeks, even
under the most scrupulous care, they lose their appetite, their tongue
becomes thickly coated with yellow fur, their breath offensive, their
bowels constipated, the evacuations being either very white or very
dark, and frequently lumpy, and coated with a thin layer of mucus from
the bowel, which also appears in shreds at the bottom of the utensil.
With this condition, too, there is some, though not considerable,
feverishness, and the urine becomes turbid on cooling, and throws down a
reddish-white deposit, which disappears if heated. At the end of two or
three days of rest in bed, of a diet of beef-tea and milk, with no solid
food, with simple saline medicines, mild aperients, and perhaps a single
small dose of calomel, the symptoms pass off; but return again and again
at uncertain intervals, and without any obvious cause.

In these cases, the children almost always, when in their ordinary
health, have a peculiar patchy condition of the tongue, one part of it
being covered with a thin white coating, through which little red points
project, while another part is of a vivid red, and looks raw and
shining, as though it had been scalded, while the red points, or the
papillae, as they are termed, project above its surface like so many
pins' heads. Children in whom this condition exists, require much
watching and much care. I have dwelt upon it in order to impress on
parents the conviction that it is not a state to be cured, once for all,
even by the most skilful doctor, but that years are needed to eradicate
a bad habit of the body, as much as to cure a bad habit of the mind.

=Jaundice.=--I have already spoken of the jaundice of new-born infants;
but a sl