placed pin or painful constriction of the dress. Convulsions are so terribly fatal to infants that the utmost care should be taken to avoid anything which is likely to cause them. As an awful example, let me tell you that according to the Registrar-General's statistics for England and Wales during the year 1871, no less than 20,089 infants died of convulsions.
The necessity for avoiding a source of great danger, which is often incurred in dressing children carelessly, is well illustrated by the following cases : —Trousseau, the great French physician, was called with Dr. Blache to see a child who had for some hours been in convulsions, for which he had been put in a warm bath. Dr. Blache, on removing the child's cap, saw a piece of thread across his head, and on trying to take it away pulled out a long needle which had entered the brain; the convulsions ceased immediately, but the child died soon afterwards of water on the brain. A similar case is recounted by Underwood, where the cause of the convulsions was not discovered till after death, when, on the cap being removed, a small pin was found sticking into the anterior fontanel. Trousseau in his Clinical Lectures 2[1]relates another case, where a son of a French Professor of Medicine having died of convulsions, for which no cause could be assigned, a post-mortem examination was held, when a needle was found transfixing the liver. Such cases as these are, doubtless, very common; owing, however, to the unreasoning but wide-
- ↑ 2 Dr. Bazire's translation, vol. i. p. 343.
