AND TO THE NATIONAL HOSPITAL FOR PARALYSIS AND EPILEPSY,

THIS WORK IS, BY PERMISSION,

DEDICATED,

AS A TOKEN OF GRATITUDE, ESTEEM, AND ADMIRATION,

BY

THE AUTHOR.

PREFACE.

Ir has been my endeavour to prepare for the senior student and practitioner a concise but complete manual of the treatment of disease in children. I have made one assumption: that the reader is already acquainted with a work on general medicine. I should like to have reflected a picture of all contemporary treatment of disease in children. This was my original intention. But the material accumulated apace; and a volume of vast dimensions would have been required. Instead I have endeavoured to give what I thought best to present a co-ordinate microcosm for the inco-ordinate chaos. All through the book I have emphasized that treatment I am accustomed to adopt.

The Alpha and Omega of all rational treatment is precise Diagnosis. It is rare that in treatment our indiscretion serveth us better than our judgment. The outlines of Diagnosis are given, but Diagnosis is a matter of practical clinical skill and sagacity hardly to be acquired from books.

Most difficult is it to state completely all the pathological differences between children and adults. Without occupying space unduly I have tried to incorporate in this work the chief differences. It will be gathered that a work which is one of Lewis's practical series cannot pretend to be of encyclopædic extent. But I confidently hope that the present

volume will be found to contain in a handy form an amount of material of a character which the student or practitioner will find of much value in his everyday professional life. I have not been content with emphatic assertions to the effect that this "must be" and that "should be," but I have also tried to give the why and wherefore, and these wherever possible, in physiological and anatomical terms.