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. They show how absurd must be the folly of that
system of "hardening" the constitution (to which reference has been
before made), which induces the parent to plunge the tender and
delicate child into the cold bath at all seasons of the year, and
freely expose it to the cold, cutting currents of an easterly wind,
with the lightest clothing.
The principles which ought to guide a parent in clothing her infant
are as follows:--
The material and quantity of the clothes should be such as to preserve
a sufficient proportion of warmth to the body, regulated therefore by
the season of the year, and the delicacy or strength of the infant's
constitution. In effecting this, however, the parent must guard against
the too common practice of enveloping the child in innumerable folds of
warm clothing, and keeping it constantly confined to very hot and close
rooms; thus running into the opposite extreme to that to which I have
just alluded: for nothing tends so much to enfeeble the constitution,
to induce disease, and render the skin highly susceptible to the
impression of cold; and thus to produce those very ailments which it
is the chief intention to guard against.
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