from the arteries to the veins, inducing dropsy in exactly a
similar manner. The dropsy of renal disease is dependent for the most
part on an excess of exudation, due largely to an increase of arterial
and cardiac tension. This in its turn produces arterial thickening and
cardiac hypertrophy, which, if the case be sufficiently prolonged,
brings about a natural removal of the fluid. In kidney cases, in the
absence of cardiac disease, the dropsy will be found to appear first
about the loose cellular tissue surrounding the eyes, where the vessels,
turgid with watery blood, have less efficient support. The dropsy of
chlorosis is very similar to renal dropsy, a toxic condition of blood
being present in both; also other forms of anaemia, as also hydraemia,
tend to produce or assist in the production of dropsical effusions.

For the treatment of dropsy the reader is referred to the articles on
the several diseases of which it is a symptom. Briefly, however, tapping
of the abdomen or puncture of the legs are constantly resorted to in
severe cases. Dehydration by diet is very valuable under certain
circumstances when the dropsy is other than renal. And there is the
routine treatment by drugs, purgative, diaphoretic and diuretic as the
symptoms of the case may demand.

It may be well to mention that there are certain affections which may be
termed _spurious dropsies_, such as _ovarian dropsy_, which is only a
cystic disease of the ovary; _hydrometria_, dropsy of the uterus, due to
inflammatory occlusion of the os uteri; _hydronephrosis_, dropsy of the
kidney, due to obstruction of the ureter, and subsequent distension of
these organs by serous accumulations; other hollow organs may also be
similarly affected.

Having no known relation to the preceding is _epidemic dropsy_, the
first recorded outbreak of which occurred in Calcutta in the year 1877.
It disappeared during the hot weather of the following year, only to
recur over a wider area in the cold months of 1878 to 1879, and once
again in the cold of 1879 to 1880. Since then only isolated cases have
been recorded in the immediate neighbourhood of Calcutta, though
epidemics have broken out in other places both by land and sea. At the
end of 1902 an outbreak occurred in the Barisal gaol, Bengal, in which
nearly one-third of the cases ended fatally. Dropsy was an invariable
feature of the disease, and was either the first symptom or occurred
early. The lower limbs were first a