Children between the ages of seven and fourteen may partake of everything at the family table except the highly spiced dishes. difficulty often met at this period of life is loss of appetite—a condition frequently caused by the modern strenuous school-life. Lack of appetite at breakfast is usually due to hasty late rising and to the nervous tension caused by the fear of being late for school. This may be overcome by sending the children to lied early enough in the evening so they may be completely rested in the morning and able to rise in time to take breakfast without haste before school. In sui Hiner children may be observed to be tired and without appetite at dinner-time. This condition may be remedied by having such patients, who are usually anemic or neur asthenic, lie down quietly for twenty minutes or half an hour before the mid-clay meal. The regulation of the habits of children suffering from loss of appetite should not be left to servants.
We also find at this period of rapid growth and development which precedes puberty that the children gorge themselves, and this habit we may at times be forced to correct.
Two questions must now be considered, which overlap each other in many points, namely, that of soup and what to give these children to drink.
Sou p used to be considered most necessary, and no matter how much the poor children detested it they were forced to swallow one or even more plates of soup once or twice a day. Fortunately the eating of soup by adults as well as children is now being abandoned to a large extent, and the rapidity with which this change is being effected shows that we may be able to abolish old customs if we lead popular taste in the right direction; children who are not given soup daily like it as a rule very much.
The one point usually mentioned in favor of soup is, that it gives an appetite, and this is true for beef tea or strong broth containing considerable amounts of extractives which stimulate the secretion of the digestive glands; most soups, however, are either not made of meat at all or are so thin, for economical reasons, that they contain none or only so little extractives that they cannot stimulate the appetite: more a child or a healthy adult does not require any such stimulation, because every well-prepared meal causes a sufficient flow of digestive juices. In the few exceptional cases in which we really have to late the appetite, a little strong broth or beef tea will be of great service. Against soup we must mention the fact that with it we may easily introduce more food, especially carbohydrates, than we really intended to do and that we accustom the stomach to voluminous amounts of food, which if not kept up will lead to a feeling of pseudohunger, and finally that we introduce too much liquid into the system. Sound
though this reasoning may be, it must not make us fanatics and let us preach against all use of soup amongst people who have used it for generations, but we must reduce the amount of soup in some cases and we will stop its consumption only when we are told that the children have to be forced to eat it and then cannot eat anything else; then only will we meet with success. We have no objection to the occasional use of soup as a variation in the diet or to make use of left-overs, and on a cold winter's day soup made with peas, beans or lentils tastes very good. The second question, and one which is closely related to that of soup, is, if we should give children anything to drink with their meals, besides the water contained in the food. Let us state first of all that we as physicians must strongly oppose the consumption of alcoholic drinks by children. True, a strong child of, let us say, ten years, will not be injured by the alcohol contained in an occasional glass of beer, but we know as a fact that the habitual use of alcohol interferes with the physical and mental development of the child, and if we do not object to its occasional use it may often develop into an habitual one. We as cians must insist on children being total abstainers. Luckily the times are past now, never to return we t rust, when a pale child or one convalescing from a severe illness was given as a second breakfast "to strengthen it some scraped raw meat and a glass of old port. We get along nicely without alcohol in t he treatment of weal: children and in Children's Hospital in Dilsseldorf alcohol is never used internally.
It is almost equally bad to give children milk with their principal meals. The meal should contain the food-st tiffs necessary for the child, and it, therefore, should not require the addition of a drink which is in itself very nourishing. The consequence of giving milk with meals is either overfeeding or a refusal of the other food.
The only drink now to be discussed is water, of which the ancient philosopher said: We must not overlook t he objections to an excessive ingestion of water, and we are liable to forget. the consequences of too much liquid. While the dangers of overfeeding are now generally recognized, those of too much water are not.