The second thing that may be done for a child threatened with some illness that looks serious is to give it a special warm bath or wrap it in a warm pack.
To give the Warm Bath the water should be at a temperature of 98° Fahr., and it is best to test the heat by the thermometer rather than by feeling with the hand. The child should be set in the bath up to the neck, and in the case of an infant, the head should be supported by the hand and arm of the nurse. The child should remain in the bath from ten to twenty minutes, the heat being all the time maintained by frequent additions of warm water round the sides. The child may then be lifted up, rolled in a half-blanket or large bath-towel, and without any drying put into bed. . After another hour, or even less if the child finds the blanket too disagreeable to let it rest, the child should be rapidly rubbed down, clothed in a warm flannel gown and carefully wrapped in the bed-clothes. Or the child may at once, on being lifted from the bath, be rubbed down, clothed in flannel, and put to bed.
The Warm child is to be stripped naked and rolled in a half-sheet or half-blanket wrung lightly out of warm water, and laid in bed and covered by the bed-clothes. It should be kept so for an hour and then rubbed down, and its flannel night-gown put on. Young children grow restless by being imprisoned in the wet sheet. They are usually quiet if their arms are allowed out of the sheet.
Thetienefit of the warm bath is that it brings the blood to the skin, it causes the blood-vessels of the skin to relax. They become able to con
tain more blood in consequence, and thus deeper parts are relieved of too great a quantity of blood. At the same time, if there is fever, the water used being of a considerably less degree of heat than the blood, heat is withdrawn from the body, and that has a soothing effect on the nervous system. If, as has been advised, an injection has previously been given and has produced free evacuations, the unloading of the bowels will have already acted in a similar way. The blood will have been diverted from the head and central nervous system, and the calm ing effect of the bath or hot pack will be all the more perceptible because of this previous action.
Now these two methods of treatment of chil dren are simple in the extreme, and if carried out with a moderate degree of intelligence are incapable of doing harm. They will often dispel from the child within a short time all the more alarming symptoms, and secure for it some quiet rest and sleep. Often a child, that late in the evening shows signs of some serious illness, if treated in this way, and if care is given to the diet, &c., as already directed, will appeiti perfectly well in the morning. Even if not, and even if the illness does go on, the child is in a much more favour able condition in relation to the future course of the illness than it would have been.