p. 14 | HE WILL GET OVER IT by Educator; Companion

Pacific Press Publishing Company · Mountain View, California · Oct 25, 1905

FromSigns of the Times, Vol. 31, No. 43.

"HE WILL GET OVER IT"

By Educator; Companion

A Little Lecture to Mothers That Is Timely Just Now.

WITHIN a year the question has been asked of three different mothers, "How is your little one who has been ill?" And the reply has been substantially the same in each case: "O, he is pretty sick, but it is nothing serious! He will get over it."

The repetition of this phrase has struck home and has awakened thought. Will the child get over it? Is it not doubtful whether the young stomach, which has been so badly disordered that the little patient has had to lie in bed for days, will ever entirely be what it would have been without this illness? Do not the severe attacks of bronchitis and pneumonia which afflict so many children leave an abiding mark behind them? Is not the case very much like that of the cracked or mended bowl? It may serve a good many purposes still, but it can never be so strong nor so useful as it was before it was injured.

The fact is that parents expect their children to be ill. They are astonished if a year passes without more or less serious invalidism among them. It is probable that some indisposition in an ordinary family of four or five persons or more is inevitable; but if there be a wise mother in charge, this illness ought seldom to be serious enough to keep the patient in bed. Utter prostration usually argues a long course of improper living beforehand.

It has too long remained unrecognized that the human body is a machine, and that its normal method of activity is in a regular routine. Children should eat as nearly as possible the same sort of food—not necessarily the same articles—but about the same proportion of nitrogenous and other foods, every day at regular hours, and never at other times. They should go to bed and get up at the same hours daily. The ventilation of their sleeping apartments, the regulation of their bathing, clothing, and all the physical operations which maintain health, should be arranged with as accurate method as is practicable, always avoiding the cast-iron system. There is no need of much nor hard illness in an ordinary family, and, unjust as the assertion may sound, there is bad management in the household where it is otherwise. To tell the truth, the carelessness, the ignorance, or the weak indulgence of mothers, is at the bottom of three-fourths of the ill health and mortality that are so shockingly prevalent among children. These mothers become used to sickness in their families, hardened to its enormity, and they really do come to think that it is a small thing. "He will get over it." The chances are ten to one that he does not get over it, but that he feels it more or less to the day of his death, which is hastened because of it.