Читать книгу A Book of Medical Discourses, in Two Parts онлайн

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It is becoming a widespread custom to send a little girl or boy to a druggist’s to purchase some advertised baby medicine or food. The patent cough syrups, or those kept on hand in shops, I deem unsafe in the hands of the inexperienced. Most, if not all of them, contain some sleep-producing ingredient, whereby they may check a cough by paralyzing, as it were, the little nerves of sensation in the air-tubes; thus giving opportunity for the phlegm to collect in great quantities, with no possible way of escape. Doubtless in this way suffocation is frequently induced, in whooping-cough, bronchitis, or croup.

Several years ago, in the city of Boston, a mother returned from work, and found her baby, which she had left alone, a corpse. Her explanation, as it appeared in the daily papers, was to the effect that she had given the child the rinsings of the vial that contained laudanum, to keep it quiet.

People are getting much wiser nowadays; laudanum and paregoric cannot be easily obtained without a recipe. But they can yet buy and give large doses of “Patent Soothing Syrups.”