§28. How far any grown people will think fit to make trial of it, must be left to them; though I cannot but say, that considering the many evils that come from that defect, of a requisite easing of nature, I scarce know anything more conducing to the preservation of health, than this is. Once in four and twenty hours, I think is enough; and nobody, I guess, will think it too much. And by this means it is to be obtained without physic, which commonly proves very ineffectual in the cure of a settled and habitual costiveness.
§29. This is all I have to trouble you with concerning his management in the ordinary course of his health. Perhaps it will be expected from me, that I should give some directions of physic, to prevent diseases; for which I have only this one, very sacredly to be observed, never to give children any physic for prevention. The observation of what I have already advised, will, I suppose, do that better than the ladies’ diet-drinks or apothecaries’ medicines. Have a great care of tampering that way, lest, instead of preventing, you draw on diseases. Nor even upon every little indisposition is physic to be given, or the physician to be called to children, especially if he be a busy man, that will presently fill their windows with gally-pots, and their stomachs with drugs. It is safer to leave them wholly to nature, than to put ’em into the hands of one forward to tamper, or that thinks children are to be cured, in ordinary distempers, by anything but diet, or by a method very little distant from it: it seeming suitable both to my reason and experience, that the tender constitutions of children should have as little done to them as is possible, and as the absolute necessity of the case requires. A little cold-stilled red poppy-water, which is the true surfeit-water with ease, and abstinence from flesh, often puts an end to several distempers in the beginning, which, by too forward applications, might have been made lusty diseases. When such a gentle treatment will not stop the growing mischief, nor hinder it from turning into a formed disease, it will be time to seek the advice of some sober and discreet physician. In this part, I hope, I shall find an easy belief; and nobody can have a pretence to doubt the advice