SUITABLE CLOTHING FOR CHILDREN-During childhood

The clothing of the child should possess the same properties as that of infancy. It should afford due warmth, be of such materials as do not irritate the skin, and so made as to occasion no unnatural constriction.

In reference to due warmth, it may be well again to repeat, that too little clothing is frequently productive of the most sudden attacks of active disease; and that children who are thus exposed with thin clothing in a climate so variable as ours are the frequent subjects of croup, and other dangerous affections of the air- passages and lungs.

On the other hand, it must not be forgotten, that too warm clothing is a source of disease, sometimes even of the same diseases which originate in exposure to cold, and often renders the frame more susceptible of the impressions of cold, especially of cold air taken into the lungs.

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SUITABLE CLOTHING FOR CHILDREN-During infancy

Infants are very susceptible of the impressions of cold; a proper regard, therefore, to a suitable clothing of the body, is imperative to their enjoyment of health. Unfortunately, an opinion is prevalent in society, that the tender child has naturally a great power of generating heat and resisting cold; and from this popular error has arisen the most fatal results.

This opinion has been much strengthened by the insidious manner in which cold operates on the frame, the injurious effects not being always manifest during or immediately after its application, so that but too frequently the fatal result is traced to a wrong source, or the infant sinks under the action of an unknown cause.

The power of generating heat in warm-blooded animals is at its minimum at birth, and increases successively to adult age; young animals, instead of being warmer than adults, are generally a degree or two colder, and part with their heat more readily; facts which cannot be too generally known.

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