THE NERVOUS CHILD

PUBLISHED BY THE JOINT COMMITTEE OF

HENRY FROWDE, HODDER & STOUGHTON

17 WARWICK SQUARE, LONDON, E.C. 4

THE

NERVOUS CHILD

BY

HECTOR CHARLES CAMERON

M.A., M.D.(Cantab.), F.R.C.P.(Lond.)

PHYSICIAN TO GUY'S HOSPITAL AND PHYSICIAN IN CHARGE OF

THE CHILDREN'S DEPARTMENT, GUY'S HOSPITAL

LONDON

HENRY FROWDE HODDER & STOUGHTON

Oxford University Press Warwick Square, E.C.

1920

First Edition 1919

Second Impression 1930

Printed in Great Britain

By Morrison & Gibb Ltd., Edinburgh

PREFACE

To-day on all sides we hear of the extreme importance of Preventive Medicine and the great future which lies before us in this aspect of our work. If so, it follows that the study of infancy and childhood must rise into corresponding prominence. More and more a considerable part of the Profession must busy itself in nurseries and in schools, seeking to apply there the teachings of Psychology, Physiology, Heredity, and Hygiene. To work of this kind, in some of its aspects, this book may serve as an introduction. It deals with the influences which mould the mentality of the child and shape his conduct. Extreme susceptibility to these influences is the mark of the nervous child.

I have to thank the Editors of The Practitioner and of The Child, respectively, for permission to reprint the chapters which deal with "Enuresis" and "The Nervous Child in Sickness." To Dr. F.H. Dodd I should also like to offer thanks for helpful suggestions.

H.C.C.

March 1919.

CONTENTS

THE NERVOUS CHILD

CHAPTER I

DOCTORS, MOTHERS, AND CHILDREN

There is an old fairy story concerning a pea which a princess once slept upon—a little offending pea, a minute disturbance, a trifling departure from the normal which grew to the proportions of intolerable suffering because of the too sensitive and undisciplined nervous system of Her Royal Highness. The story, I think, does not tell us much else concerning the princess. It does not tell us, for instance, if she was an only child, the sole preoccupation of her parents and nurses, surrounded by the most anxious care, reared with some difficulty because of her extraordinary "delicacy," suffering from a variety of illnesses which somehow always seemed to puzzle the doctors, though some of the symptoms—the vomiting, for example, and the high temperature—were very severe