Locke: Physic

Some Thoughts Concerning Education - by John Locke, 1693

§ 29 Physic. This is all I have to trouble you with, concerning his management, in the ordinary course of his health and 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 apothecary's 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 them into the hands of one forward to tamper, or that thinks children are to be cured in ordinary distempers, by any thing 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, but that it will turn 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 of one, who has spent some time in the study of physic, when he counsels you not to be too forward in making use of physic and physicians.

§ 30 And thus I have done with what concerns the body and health, which reduces itself to these few and easily observable rules. Plenty of open air, exercise, and sleep; plain diet, no wine or strong drink, and very little or no physic; not too warm and strait clothing; especially the head and feet kept cold, and the feet often used to cold water and exposed to wet.