Even the milder epileptic cases are hard to manage. I rarely see one which has been intelligently dealt with. Few mothers are able or willing to use a rule as stern, as enduring, as unyielding as they require.
As to education, I am satisfied that these children are the better for it, and yet almost invariably I find that in the cases referred to me some physician has, with too little thought, recommended entire abandonment or avoidance of mental training. I have neither space nor desire to go into my reasons for a different belief. I am, however, sure that education limited as to time, education of mind, and especially of the hands, has for these cases distinct utility, while to them also, as to the other children crippled in mind or body, all that I have already urged applies with equal force.
As to the management of sick or crippled childhood, I have said far more than I had at first meant to say, and chiefly because I have been made to feel, as I thought the matter over, how far more difficult it is in practice than in theory. But this applies to all moral lessons, and the moralist must be credited by the thoughtful mother with a full perception of the embarrassments which lie in her path.
NERVOUSNESS AND ITS INFLUENCE ON CHARACTER.
There are two questions often put to me which I desire to use as texts for the brief essay or advice of which nervousness[4] is the heading. As concerns this matter, I shall here deal with women alone, and with women as I see and know them. I have elsewhere written at some length as to nervousness in the male, for he, too, in a minor degree, and less frequently, may become the victim of this form of disability.
[Footnote 4: Neither _nerves_ nor _nervousness_ are words to be found in the Bible or Shakespeare. The latter uses the word nerve at least seven times in the sense of sinewy. _Nervy_, which is obsolete, he employs as full of nerves, sinewy, strong. It is still heard in America, but I am sure would be classed as slang. Writers, of course, still employ nerve and nervous in the old sense, as a nervous style. Bailey's dictionary, 1734, has nervous,--sinewy, strongly made. Robt. Whytte, Edin., in the preface to his work on certain maladies, 1765, says, "Of late these have also got the name of nervous," and this is the earliest use of the word in the modern meaning I have found. Richardson has it in both its modern meanings, "vigorous," or "sensitive in nerves, and consequently weak, diseased." Hysteria is not in the Bible, and is found once in Shakespeare; as, "Hysterica passio, down," Lear ii. 4. It was common in Sydenham's day,--_i.e._, Charles II. and Cromwell's time,--but he classified under hysteria many disorders no longer considered as of this nature.]