The problem of enuresis has existed since the days of the
cavemen, ever since people began to want to keep their living
space clean, which meant that they needed to control their
excretory functions.
(The word “enuresis”, by the way, comes form
the Greek
enourein, which means ”empty urine”.)
Enuresis
must have been a significant social problem, to judge from
the many solutions cited in the literature as having been
attempted over the centuries (prayers, a variety of rituals,
terrifying therapies, punishing and shaming the child, special
diets, different pharmacological solutions, lumbar punctures,
surgical therapy, dangerous alarms, etc. Some of these therapies
were appallingly cruel and others were highly dangerous,
but most of them had one thing in common—they were
utterly ineffective.
The first references date back to about 1500 BC. In the
late 17th century all the authors who dealt with the subject
referred to the use of mixed treatments, some of which was
rationally based while the rest depended on magical beliefs.
In the 19th century, when paediatrics first became established
as a specialised area of medicine, the number of studies
of enuresis increased considerably.
Nowadays, nocturnal enuresis is studied as one of several
sleep disorders involving disturbance of sleep quality or
behaviour when asleep (“parasomnia”).
We
now know, for example, that enuresis is a normal physiological
process until a certain degree of neuromuscular maturity
is reached.
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