ed position that this morbid condition seems to occupy in
medical literature, as well as the meagre and unsatisfactory treatment
it has received by the majority of those who have mentioned it. It is
anomalous, to say the least, to find, in general or special literature,
enuresis mentioned as a diseased condition peculiar from babyhood to
puberty; to find it fully described and to have it stated that it is a
widely-prevalent distemper, affecting both sexes alike; to know that it
is an annoying, intractable, persistent condition, wearing to the child
in every sense, subjecting it to a demoralizing mortification as well as
to unmerited scoldings, humiliations, and punishments, and that its
habit, in badly-ventilated quarters, will breed other diseases,[107] as
well as that its continued action tends to the development of onanism,
with its long and widely-ramifying trains of physical and social ills;
and to find works especially devoted to children's diseases silent on
the subject. Knowing all these things, and also that Ultzmann,
Lallemand, and others who have treated this affection, mention it as a
children's disease, it is unaccountable to reason out why most of our
text-books and treatises on children's diseases should be so remarkably
and unreasonably silent. It certainly cannot be laid to its lacking in
study material, as the author of "Quain's Dictionary of Medicine" says:
"It is one relative to which much might be written without exhausting
the subject, the pathology of which has wide and manifold relations....
There appears to be something analogous between this condition and that
which determines in after life the seminal emissions under similar
circumstances." Our American works are notably deficient in this regard;
although Stewart, of New York, in his "Diseases of Children," published
over fifty years ago, devotes a chapter to dysuria and one to retention
of urine, treating the subject quite fully, even down to the description
of preputial calculi; he, however, failed to notice that the irritation
of preputial constriction or adhesions will produce both conditions,
and, following many of the authors of the time, as has been done since,
he adopted the urino-digestion theory of acid and irritating urine, due
to faulty digestion, of Prout and Magendie, who looked to regulating the
digestion of the child, or the mother who nursed it, as the only method
of cure; the lithic-acid diathesis being, in their opinion, the ma