Preliminary Note on the Parasites of Small-Pox and Chicken-Pox

Abstract

generally more or less red and inflamed; if cancerous, not so. Tenderness and heat indicate tuberculosis rather than cancer.In the diagnosis between tuberculous and primary cancerous lymph glands in old people the chief indications of cancer are hardness, close-clustering, deep-seated attachments and quick increase. In the cervical glands, which in old persons are the most frequent seats of both tubercle and cancer, the lower glands are generally tuberculous, the upper cancerous; the soft primary cancerous disease is very rare in the old. Cancerous disease in the old is often secondary to some comparatively trivial primary disease, tuberculous is very rarely so.As age advances rest and warmth and nourishing food become more important than any treatment by cod-liver oil or iron or iodine, or even sea or mountain air.It is remarkable that many persons have attained a great age under very insanitary conditions-in defiance of them, as it were. We sometimes hear the great ages of certain persons in a district quoted as evidence of the good sanitary state of the village or town, whereas a large proportion of the inhabitants may have died young, while some survivors, inured to the evil surroundings, may have attained to great age, thus exemplifying the ability of the human body to adapt itself to varying and even unfavourable conditions.The power of repair after injury and disease which is shown by some very old people is interesting and remarkable. Fractures (excepting the well-known fracture of the neck of femur) often unite as quickly as in younger persons, and wounds and ulcers often heal rapidly. It seems as though the nutritive efforts requisite for the work of healing may possibly take place more quietly and smoothly, with less of that nerve irritation and of haste which is incompatible with good speed or safe progress.It is always of the greatest importance to ensure regular and efficient action of the bowels by attention to diet and the administration of laxative drugs with tonic action, for example, cascara, colocynth, or aloin, with belladonna and strychnine. Saline aperients are as a rule too "cold" for the aged, and when administered must be combined with aromatics.A dose of calomel may frequently be given with much benefit to the old and those who are not very unsound. Its marked antiseptic qualities are very beneficial in purifying the alimentary tract, and so clearing out noxious bacterial toxirsa of gastro-intestinal -origin which give rise to many cases of chronic toxaemia ending even in general paralysis or tabes dorsalis. Few remedies are more useful in many cases of bronchitis with dyspnoea and inefficient expectoration in old people than a good purge, for example, the pulv. jalapa co.;it not only produces copious serous motions, but also acts on the kidneys, and thus, so to speak, drains the lungs.Diuretics, especially potassium acetate, are valuable where the skin is altered in structure with advancing years, and does not perspire. They seem to take the place of diaphoretics, which often fail in ...