some cases
tub baths with the temperature as low as 40 degrees are used. Then a
proper diet to keep up the strength of the patient, liquids always, and
usually milk, forms the only other treatment possible. No drug is of any
avail, and uninterrupted watchful care is the only way of combating the
disease.

In concluding this chapter, it may be mentioned that certain army
officers interested in medical work have discovered what they believe to
be an antitoxin for typhoid fever, and they have inoculated hundreds of
soldiers as a preventative. The results are not yet conclusive, but
there seems to be great promise. It is hoped that the time may come soon
when people will be so educated that there will be no opportunity of the
germs escaping from the sick room, and that food and drink will be so
cared for that there will be no possibility of infection. The writer
feels that it is in these last two methods of prevention rather than in
the use of antitoxin that the hope of the future lies.

CHAPTER XVIII

_CHILDREN'S DISEASES_

There are four diseases, scarlet fever, measles, whooping cough, and
chicken pox, which are recognized as belonging preeminently to the
period of childhood and which are supposed to be the result of bacterial
contagion, although, curiously, the specific bacteria concerned in any
one of these four diseases has not been detected. They may be rationally
grouped together for two reasons. First, because of their attacking, in
the majority of cases, children under the age of fifteen years, and
second, because the first stages of these diseases are very similar, so
that the recognition of them is not easy except for the practiced
physician. It must not be thought, however, that because these are
diseases of childhood and because a majority of children have them at
one time or another, without great suffering and without serious after
effects, they are on that account to be despised. Scarlet fever, for
instance, is to-day probably the most dreaded of children's diseases,
not because so many children die of it,--although the death-rate is
large, about 20 per cent of the cases finally succumbing,--but because
of the large number of complications and consequences which are directly
due to this disease. Measles, also, though not to the same extent, is
frequently followed by serious after results. In the United States,
about 13,000 children die every year of measles and about half as many
die of scarle