The suggestion acting on the child's mind must be altered, and
self-confidence restored. The child must learn to see that the thing
is not so desperately tragic. He should be told that the trouble
always gets well, and that it only goes on now because he is worried
about it and keeps thinking of it. If the whole environment of the
child is bad, so that such a change of suggestion is not possible, and
if enuresis is but one of many symptoms of mental or moral
instability, it may be necessary to remove the child and place him
under the influence of some one else. Sometimes the prescription of a
rubber urinal, which the child can slip on at night, is directly
curative. A public school boy, who was about to be sent away from
school for this failing, fortified by the possession of this
apparatus, wrote six months later to say that he knew now that it must
be all worry that caused the trouble, because with the urinal in
position he had not once had the incontinence.

In inveterate cases hypnotic suggestion is always, I think,
successful. It is obvious, however, that in many cases there are
objections to its use. Often enuresis is evidence that the child's
home environment has been at fault, and that his mental and moral
development has been retarded. It is the management which must be
modified or the home, if necessary, changed. Hypnotic suggestion will
make this one symptom disappear promptly enough, but it will rather
perpetuate than combat the cause--that undue susceptibility to
suggestion, which is characteristic alike of the little child and of
many older neuropathic persons.