[104] I have often performed dilatation where, for some reason, either the timidity of the parents or the health of the child seemed to contraindicate any more radical procedure. It is customary to advise mothers or the nurses to retract the skin daily, but even after a good dilatation I have found as sudden a recontraction, and even in the majority of cases, where daily drawing back the skin might have been practicable, the cries and struggles of the child are a positive prohibition to these instructions being carried out; it is not once in ten times that it can be carried out. I have seen two very annoying cases of paraphimosis resulting from this procedure, the struggles of the child having prevented the return of the prepuce to its proper place, and the violent crying and sobbing of the child having assisted to congest the organ.
[105] It may well be a question, considering the well-established fact that nervous injuries and affections are easily transmissible and become hereditary, how much feeble-mindedness is due to an heredity originally induced in either parent through reflex neuroses from the genital organs. The Jews have a very small percentage of feeble-minded; it is true that they have not any inebriates to assist in their manufacture, but still the absence of these well-pronounced cases of reflex neuroses among the race must be largely ascribed to their practice of circumcision, as that operation cures the gentiles so afflicted.
[106] I have seen precisely similar conditions resulting from a sphincterismus being relieved by anal dilatation. I had one such case who had fallen into the hands of a quack, who made him believe that he was being affected with incipient softening of the brain; systematic dilatation or a rupture of the sphincter _à la_ Van Buren is the appropriate remedy.
[107] In the first volume of the "American and English Encyclopedia of Law" there is an interesting account of a young child (who had been bound out by the parish officials) who murdered his little bed-fellow and, on trial and conviction, was sentenced to be hanged, but who was reprieved by royal favor on account of his tender years, the sentence being changed to imprisonment for life. The little fellow was only eight years of age. On the trial the boy said he was driven to commit the crime because the other child soiled the bed. The two children being both paupers, it may well be imagined that their bedding was none of the cleanest at the best, or that their bed-room had the best of ventilation. As at the time the murder was committed English paupers were not treated in the most humane manner, it is not surprising that a nervous, sensitive child would, under such a combination of circumstances, be converted into an insane murderer.