res to follow, and if necessary
another medical man of experience should be associated with the first,
and allowed to visit the child two or three times. One does not
associate the idea of moral delinquency with hysteria; the child who
shams belongs to the same class with the hysterical patient. It is only
the strangeness of the occurrence in the eyes of non-medical people,
that makes them fancy it something worse.

If now the suspicion is justified that the child is either greatly
exaggerating or altogether feigning illness, it does not by any means
always follow that he should at once be charged with it, since it is
often of much importance that his self-respect should not be destroyed.
It must be remembered that there is in all these cases a measure of real
ailment underlying all the half-unconscious exaggeration, and that if
spoiling and over-indulgence do much to foster it, sternness and
punishment interfere with recovery. To turn the thoughts away from self,
to occupy the mind with new scenes, new amusements, new pursuits, to
call forth by degrees self-control, and to let the child perceive rather
by your manner than by what is actually said that the parents have not
been duped by all his past vagaries; such are the simple means by which
the little one will be brought round again to health of mind and health
of body. Unhappily, in the minds of too many people the idea of the
doctor is associated with the administration of drugs and with nothing
else; the treatment of disease is of much wider scope; and many of our
best remedies are those which do not admit of being weighed or measured,
and whose names are not inscribed on the drawers or bottles in
Apothecaries' Hall.

Another phase of mental disorder in childhood sometimes presents itself
as the result of overtasking the intellectual powers. This over-work too
is by no means due in all cases to the parents' unwisely urging the
child forward, but it is often quite voluntary on his part. The
precaution too of limiting the hours of work is often inadequate from
the want of some provision for turning the thoughts and energies during
play hours into some perfectly different channel.

In many of these cases Nature happily takes matters into her own
management. For a year or two, or more, the mind has grown apparently at
the expense of the body; the parents take a fearful joy in their
darling's acquirements; and if it should live, think they, of what
remarkable talent