emperature when administered in
enormous and frequently repeated doses; but such administration has often
been found to be decidedly detrimental to the patient, producing not
infrequently serious injury to the stomach, kidneys, and sometimes the
nervous system. So great is the danger of such injurious results, few
careful practitioners have cared to adopt the heroic "antipyretic"
medication recommended by experimenters, preferring to allow their
patients to burn with fever, mitigated only by such simple means as are
commonly employed by nurses, than to require them to combat the poisonous
influences of a drug in addition to the morbid element of the disease.

Happily, however, it is not necessary to leave the patient to the unaided
efforts of nature. By cool sponging of the surface, persistently and
thoroughly applied; by large, cool compresses placed over the abdomen and
chest, or even the whole front of the body, and changed as often as warm,
or every three to five minutes; by frequently repeated cool packs; by cold
water drinking; by ice-packs to the spine; by constant application of ice
or frozen compresses to the head; by forcing perspiration by copious hot
drinks and a warm blanket pack--by any or all of these means the
temperature may be reduced with promptness in nearly every case. However,
cases will now and then occur in which the temperature remains dangerously
high, notwithstanding the thorough application of the above means. What
shall be done?

Several years ago our attention was called to a series of experiments made
by Dr. Winternitz, Professor of Hydropathy in the Medical University of
Vienna, for the purpose of determining the influence upon temperature of
enemas of water of different temperature in cases of fever. The results
claimed by Prof. Winternitz were so striking that we improved the first
opportunity to repeat his experiments, and with such results as have
justified the continued use of this means of lowering temperatures in
fever, in cases in which the ordinary measures were not efficient. The
only objection we have found to the method has been the inconvenience to
the patient occasioned by the frequent use of the bed-pan. In a recent
case in which we found it necessary to resort to this method, the nurse
observed that if the tin can of the fountain syringe used in administering
the enema happened to be lowered below the level of the bed on which the
patient lay, water which had previously be