idly develops.

This process in from sixty to eighty per cent of cases will continue for
from three to seven days, when a check will come and the condition will
gradually improve. This is a sign that the defensive tissues of the body
have succeeded in rallying their forces against the attack, and have
poured out sufficient amounts of their natural antitoxin to neutralize
the poisons poured in by the invaders. The membrane begins to break down
and peel off the throat, the temperature goes down, the headache
disappears, the swelling in the glands of the neck may either subside or
go on to suppuration and rupture, but within another week the child is
fairly on the way to recovery.

Should the invaders, however, have secured a foothold in the larynx,
then the picture is sadly different. The child may have even less
headache, temperature, and general sense of illness; but he begins to
cough, and the cough has a ringing, brassy sound. Within forty-eight, or
even twenty-four, hours he begins to have difficulty in respiration.
This rapidly increases as the delicate tissues of the larynx swell under
the attack of the poison, and the very membrane which is created in an
attempt at defense becomes the body's own undoing by increasing the
blocking of the air-passages. The difficulty of breathing becomes
greater and greater, until the little victim tosses continually from
side to side in one constant, agonizing struggle for breath. After a
time, however, the accumulation of carbon dioxide in the blood produces
its merciful narcotic effect, and the struggles cease. The breathing
becomes shallower and shallower, the lips become first blue, then ashy
pale, and the little torch of life goes out with a flicker. This was
what we had to expect, in spite of our utmost effort, in from seventy to
ninety per cent of these laryngeal cases, before the days of the blessed
antitoxin. Now we actually reverse these percentages, prevent the vast
majority of cases from developing serious laryngeal symptoms at all, and
save from seventy to eighty per cent of those who do.

Our only resource in this form of the disease used to be by mechanical
or surgical means, opening the windpipe below the level of the
obstruction and inserting a curved silver tube--the so-called
tracheotomy operation; or later, and less heroic, by pushing forcibly
down into the larynx, and through and past the obstruction at the vocal
cords, a small metal tube through which the ch