Page 233 - My FlipBook

it comes to operations that are painful, children fail to give
them their confidence. Why, I do not know. Often I see
persons who are skillful operators and able to command a
large practice, who cannot operate well for children ; children
do not like them for some reason. While others seem par-
ticularly fitted for the handling of children; children take to
them ; they control children easily. There js something in the
approach that gains the confidence of the child. This can
be cultivated in a large degree. Generally those persons who
have a great love for children control children well. This
is not the universal rule, however. The vagaries
of the minds of children is something that is very
difficult to understand. Often they will give their confidence
to a stranger when they will not give their confidence, so far
as painful operations are concerned, to persons that they
know well. A case of this kind came to me something over
a year ago. A surgeon asked me to go and see a little fellow
who had subperiosteal abscess over the temporal bone. The
little fellow had been suffering greatly and the surgeon
wanted to make an exploratory operation. The little fellow
fought against it and his mother fought against it, and be-
tween the father and the surgeon and the mother and the
child, it was a kind of a drawn battle. I went and looked
the little fellow over and was decidedly of the opinion that the
surgeon was right in what he was proposing to do. I talked
with the little fellow a few moments, and with the mother, as
to what was necessary to relieve him, and he looked up into
my face and asked me, "\\^ill you go with me and stay with
me?" I told him I would, and he said, "Then I will do it."
I got the child's confidence, somehow, and in gaining the
child's confidence I gained the mother's confidence. The lit-
tle fellow met me at the hospital the next morning cheerfully
and the operation was performed. Now, this little fellow
had given me his confidence—a total stranger to him—when
he had refused his confidence to the surgeon, a man with
whom he had been acquainted all his life and for whom the
child had manifested considerable fondness. Now. these
vagaries come up in children, and you will often do well,
if you find you have failed to gain the confidence of the child,
to recommend that child to someone else, or have someone
else see the child with you. P^ossibl} you may gain the

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