To him who takes for his guide the necessities of the constitution, it will be obvious that the modes of treatment commonly resorted to should in such cases be reversed; and that, instead of straining to the utmost the already irritable powers of the precocious child, leaving his dull competitors to ripen at leisure, a systematic attempt ought to be made, from early infancy, to rouse to action the languid faculties of the latter, while no pains should be spared to moderate and give tone to the activity of the former. But instead of this, the prematurely intelligent child is generally sent to school, and tasked with lessons at an unusually early age, while the healthy but more backward boy, who requires to be stimulated, is kept at home in idleness merely on account of his backwardness. A double error is here committed, and the consequences to the active-minded boy are not unfrequently the permanent loss both of health and of his envied superiority of intellect.
In speaking of children of this description, Dr. Brigham, in an excellent little work on the influence of mental excitement on health, remarks as follows: "Dangerous forms of scrofulous disease among children have repeatedly fallen under my observation, for which I could not account in any other way than by supposing that the brain had been excited at the expense of the other parts of the system, and at a time in life when nature is endeavoring to perfect all the organs of the body; and after the disease commenced, I have seen, with grief, the influence of the same cause in retarding or preventing recovery. I have seen several affecting and melancholy instances of children, five or six years of age, lingering a while with diseases from which those less gifted readily recover, and at last dying, notwithstanding the utmost efforts to restore them. During their sickness they constantly manifested a passion for books and mental excitement, and were admired for the maturity of their minds. The chance for the recovery of such precocious children is, in my opinion, small when attacked by disease; and several medical men have informed me that their own observations had led them to form the same opinion, and have remarked that, in two cases of sickness, if one of the patients was a child of superior and highly-cultivated mental powers, and the other one equally sick, but whose mind had not been excited by study, they should feel less confident of the recovery of the former than of the latter. This mental precocity results from an unnatural development of one organ of the body at the expense of the constitution."