Children are singularly imitative, and more or less prone to suffer from
this tendency. Hence the curious cases in which a child simulates, I do
not say dissimulates, the malady it sees constantly before it, as when
one child has attacks of false epilepsy, owing to having seen the real
attack in a sister or brother, or when St. Vitus's dance runs through a
school or an asylum.

To sum up, we credit these little ones with a simplicity of moral
organization which forbids us to believe that the causes which are
active for mischief in their elders are not as potent for evil in them.
The popular and reasonable creed of moral education, which teaches us to
ask from a well child self-control, self-restraint, truth of statement,
reasonable endurance of the unavoidable, good temper, is not too lightly
or too entirely to be laid aside when sickness softens the rule of
health and all our hearts go out in pity to the little sufferer.

Certain of the nervous and other maladies of children sometimes keep
them a long while under treatments which are annoying, painful, or
disabling. They often end by leaving them as strong as their fellows,
but crippled, lame, disfigured, or with troubles that attract remark,
or, at least, notice. Thus, a child may have hip-disease, and, after
years of treatment, get well, and although vigorous enough to do all
that is required in life, be more or less lame. In another case, there
is disease of the bones of the spine. After a wearying treatment, it is
well, but the little one has a distorted spine,--is humpbacked. Again,
we have the common malady, palsy of childhood, and here, too, most
probably, there is left a residue of disability, or, at all events, some
loss of power.