Family thermometry : a manual of thermonetry, for mothers, nurses, hospitalers, etc., and all who have charge of the sick and of the young / by Edward Seguin.

  • Seguin, Edward, 1812-1880.
Date:
1873
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Family thermometry : a manual of thermonetry, for mothers, nurses, hospitalers, etc., and all who have charge of the sick and of the young / by Edward Seguin. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    tion for your ehild, will excel the doctor's, and become almost prophetic. This motherly and medical education of the hand, for it is both, does not allow a disease to gain a long start over the treatment—when children need medication, it cannot come too soon—and enables us to distinguish dis- comfort from illness^ thus saying not only a great deal of trouble and anxiety, but of unnecessary medical in- tervention : where nursing will do, prescribing is a fraud; though often imposed on the impostor, by the necessity of allaying the blind apprehensions of a family. But women, by educating their hand to feel the tem- perature of their children, not only free themselves from ignorance and its low train of prejudices and fears; they also cultivate in themselves a sense, the tact, whose normal development is necessary to the attainment of two of the most elevated purposes of life: art and purity. For the elevation of the touch to the dignity of tact prepares the hand to execute the most chaste and artis- tic conceptions of the mind in drawing, cutting, and general ornamentation of self and home; as it extends and refines the delicacy and physiological sanctity of living contacts, and leaves no room for gross and hap- hazard desires in the beast once idealized to the very tip of her fingers. Such are some of the direct and side-rewards of the education of the hand to feel motherly, tenderly, and intelligently. By this latter capacity—a gift of love, too seldom developed by culture—a mother, or devoted attendant, is made aware of any general or local disturb- ance of temperature ; knows that there is peril, and takes her thermometer to measure it.