Evening Republican, Volume 14, Number 204, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 27 August 1910 — FEAR OF NIGHT IS DISEASE [ARTICLE]

FEAR OF NIGHT IS DISEASE

English Magistrate Fines Nurse for leaving Children Alone in Dark Unprotected. London.—Great public interest has been aroused by the case of Kate Bell, a Hampstead nursemaid, who was fined 40 shillings at Marylebone police court for leaving three young children alone in the house while her -master and mistress went out for the evening. Her mistress, Mrs. Hearne, returning home unexpectedly at 8:30 p. m., discovered that the nurse and both servants had gone out, leaving the three children, age thirteen months, three years and four years, respectively, entirely unprotected. In fining her the magistrate, Paul -Taylor, told the nurse that “her conduct showed a very inadequate consciousness of her duty. She had been guilty of a serious moral delinquency.” The house surgeon of a largo children’s hospital in South London, considered “moral delinquency” much too mild a term. “The callous way in which young children are left alone nowadays,” he said, "amounts to positive crime—it occurr most frequently among the very poor. “The criminality of the proceeding lies in this; that, in nine cases out of ten, leaving children alone means frightening them into submission with all manner of absurd tgles. "A very frequent instance of what I mean occurs when a married couple go out for an evening at six o’clock, say, and tell the infant upstairs that a tiger will come from under the bed and eat it if it cries or gets up while they are out. “What that poor mite suffers in its loneliness passes all description. “As often as not, too, its nerves become permanently affected, and it suffers in youth from a nervous disease which is now classified as pavor nocturnus—dread of the night “And when the child grows up pavor nocturnus will turn to St. Vitus’ dance, or ‘habit spasms.’ or one or other of the serious nervous affections with which the next generation promises to be rife. “Pavor nocturnus—the symptoms of which are constant tears and intense nervousness—is an illness we dread here, because it is next to impossible to - do anything for a child’s other complaints until, by long hours, or even days, of patient coaxing, its nerves are restored. “But if ’ pavor nocturnes gets too

firm a hold any cure we can effect is temporary at best, for the child’s nervous system has been ruined for life.”