e the danger of this disease is
owing to the general tendency to gangrene, with petechiae, or purple spots,
and haemorrhages; besides the two sources of danger from the tumor of the
throat about the height, or eleventh day of the eruption, and the purulent
fever after that time; which are generally much more to be dreaded in this
than in the distinct small-pox described above.

M. M. The method of treatment must vary with the degree and kind of fever.
Venesection may be used in the distinct small-pox early in the disease,
according to the strength or hardness of the pulse; and perhaps on the
first day of the confluent small-pox, and even of the plague, before the
sensorial power is exhausted by the violence of the arterial action? Cold
air, and even washing or bathing in cold water, is a powerful means in
perhaps all eruptive diseases attended with fever; as the quantity of
eruption depends on the quantity of the fever, and the activity of the
cutaneous vessels; which may be judged of by the heat produced on the skin;
and which latter is immediately abated by exposure to external cold.
Mercurial purges, as three grains of calomel repeated every day during the
eruptive fever, so as to induce three or four stools, contribute to abate
inflammation; and is believed by some to have a specific effect on the
variolous, as it is supposed to have on the venereal contagion.

It has been said, that opening the pock and taking out the matter has not
abated the secondary fever; but as I had conceived, that the pits, or marks
left after the small-pox, were owing to the acrimony of the matter beneath
the hard scabs, which not being able to exhale eroded the skin, and
produced ulcers, I directed the faces of two patients in the confluent
small-pox to be covered with cerate early in the disease, which was daily
renewed; and I was induced to think, that they had much less of the
secondary fever, and were so little marked, that one of them, who was a
young lady, almost entirely preserved her beauty. Perhaps mercurial
plasters, or cerates, made without turpentine in them, might have been more
efficacious, in preventing the marks, and especially if applied early in
the disease, even on the first day of the eruption, and renewed daily. For
it appears from the experiments of Van Woensel, that calomel or sublimate
corrosive, triturated with variolous matter, incapacitates it from giving
the disease by inoculation. Calomel or sublimate given as