DYSURIA, ENURESIS, AND RETENTION OF URINE.
Any dissertation on circumcision and its many uses, either prophylactic or curative, would be incomplete without a reference to enuresis; another reason for making a somewhat full reference to the subject would be the undecided 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 main thing to be guarded from.