Page:Transactions of the Provincial Medical and Surgical Association, volume 1.djvu/121

 of it, yet, it cannot be denied, that cases not infrequently occur, presenting all the phenomena characteristic of hydrocephalus, which have been effectually relieved by the use of calomel, without the aid of either leeches or blisters. Nor is there any case that calls for nicer discrimination, than the treatment of infantile comatose symptoms, which are too generally received as unequivocal indications of oppressed brain, and consequently calling for the most active treatment. How often does it happen, that simple debility, unassociated with increased vascular action, exists in children supposed to labour under hydrocephalus? If, for instance, the system has been reduced by long disease, or if the child has been suckled too long, or where (from the ill health of the mother,) the quality of the milk is bad, and a gradual wasting of the body of the infant takes place; is a tendency to coma in such a child, to be treated as an indication of oppressed brain? We know that, when debility exists, the irritability of the system is often increased by it, and convulsions take place as the consequence of extreme exhaustion. In delicate and feeble children, and particularly among the poor, when the milk of the mother is impoverished by scanty nutriment, and a tabid state of the infant is the consequence, do we not find that a careful exhibition of tonic remedies will often succeed in removing that tendency to drowsiness, better than a system of depletion? One of the most recent instances of the efficacy of such treatment, which I have seen, occurred a few months ago, in a child, Mary Shaw, æt. two years, an out-patient of the infirmary, who lay for many weeks in a state of