discourage
and forbid the indiscriminate kissing of children, and the crusade
against the uses of the mouth as a pencil-holder, pincushion, and
general receptacle for odds and ends, would be thoroughly justified by
the risks from diphtheria alone, to say nothing of tuberculosis and
other infections.

In addition to being almost the only common disease of childhood which
is not mild and becoming milder, diphtheria is unique in another
respect, and that is its point of attack. Just as tuberculosis seizes
its victims by the lungs, and typhoid fever by the bowels,
diphtheria--like the weasel--grips at the throat. Its bacilli, entering
through the mouth and gaining a foothold first upon the tonsils, the
palate, or back of the throat (pharynx), multiply and spread until they
swarm down into the larynx and windpipe, where their millions, swarming
in the mesh of fibrin poured out by the outraged blood-vessels, grow
into the deadly false membrane which fills the air-tube and slowly
strangles its victim to death.

The horrors of a death like that can never fade from the memory of one
who has once seen it, and will outweigh the lives of a thousand
guinea-pigs. No wonder there was such a widespread and peculiar horror
of the disease, as of some ghostly thug or strangler.

But not all of the dread of diphtheria went under its own name. Most of
us can still remember when the commonest occupant of the nursery shelf
was the bottle of ipecac or soothing-syrup as a specific against croup.
The thing that most often kept the mother or nurse of young children
awake and listening through the night-watches was the sound of a cough,
and the anxious waiting to hear whether the next explosion had a
"croupy" or brassy sound. It was, of course, early recognized that there
were two kinds of croup, the so-called "spasmodic" and the "membranous,"
the former comparatively common and correspondingly harmless, the latter
one of the deadliest of known diseases. The fear that made the mother's
heart leap into her mouth as she heard the ringing croup-cough was lest
it might be membranous, or, if spasmodic, might turn into the deadly
form later. To-day most young mothers hardly know the name of wine of
ipecac or alum, and the coughs of young children awaken little more
terror than a similar sound in an adult. Croup has almost ceased to be
one of the bogies of the nursery. And why? Because membranous croup has
been discovered to be diphtheria, and childr