ich can adhere
to the clothes of the attendants, and when dried is liable to be shook off
in the form of powder, and thus propagate the infection.

This contagious powder of the small-pox, and of the scarlet fever, becomes
mixed with saliva in the mouth, and is thus carried to the tonsils, the
mucus of which arrests some particles of this deleterious material; while
other parts of it are carried into the stomach, and are probably decomposed
by the power of digestion; as seems to happen to the venom of the viper,
when taken into the stomach. Our perception of bad tastes in our mouths, at
the same time that we perceive disagreeable odours to our nostrils, when we
inhale very bad air, occasions us to spit out our saliva; and thus, in some
instances, to preserve ourselves from infection. This has been supposed to
originate from the sympathy between the organs of taste and smell; but any
one who goes into a sick room close shut up, or into a crowded
assembly-room, or tea-room, which is not sufficiently ventilated, may
easily mix the bad air with the saliva on his tongue so as to taste it; as
I have myself frequently attended to.

Hence it appears that these heavy infectious matters are more liable to mix
with the saliva, and inflame the tonsils, and that either before or at the
commencement of the fever; and this is what generally happens in the
scarlet fever, always I suppose in the malignant kind, and very frequently
in the mild kind. But as this infection may be taken by other means, as by
the skin, it also happens in the most mild kind, that there is no
inflammation of the tonsils at all; in the same manner as there is
generally no inflammation of the tonsils in the inoculated small-pox.

In the mild scarlatina on the fourth day of the fever the face swells a
little, at the same time a florid redness appears on various parts of the
skin, in large blotches, at length coalescing, and after three days
changing into branny scales.

M. M. Cool air. Fruit. Lemonade. Milk and water.

_Scarlatina maligna._ The malignant scarlet fever begins with inflamed
tonsils; which are succeeded by dark drab coloured sloughs three or five
lines in diameter, flat, or beneath the surrounding surface; and which
conceal beneath them spreading gangrenous ulcers. The swellings of the
tonsils are sensible to the eye and touch externally, and have an elastic
rather than an oedematous feel, like parts in the vicinity of gangrenes.
The pulse is ve