484 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



by keeping the patient in a half -sitting posture, and cooling his temples 

 from time to time with a wet towel, or, in extreme cases, with the 

 above-mentioned ice-pack.* After a profuse perspiration the pulse 

 will gradually become normal, and the feverish brain pass into a sort 

 of twilight state between slumber and more or less fantastic day- 

 dreams, but without obstreperous symptoms and without oppressive 

 headaches. 



All this, however, on condition that the bark of Cinchona calisaya 

 is left severely alone. I have seen quinine-drunk patients break away 

 from their nurses and rush out into the street like Indian amuck-run- 

 ners, or sit moaning on their beds, freed from the febrile diathesis, 

 but afflicted with ear-aches that pierce the head like twinges of neu- 

 ralgia, and often impair the hearing for months together. Quinine 

 sticks to the system like mercury, and I doubt if there is such a thing 

 as perfect recovery from the effects of its protracted use. Strychnine, 

 bitter-orange peel, Valeriana, arsenic, and snake-root, are equally ob- 

 jectionable, and often produce after-effects that are ascribed to other 

 causes, or to a lingering nervousness induced by the fever itself. Be- 

 sides, the removal of the cause is the only radical fever-cure ; chemi- 

 cal antiseptics merely palliate the symptoms, as a cloth mantle would 

 smother a fire, till it gets strong enough to break out through cloth 

 and all. Frost kills out flies where arsenic fails. By the refrigeration- 

 cure the zymotic disease-germs are, as it were, frozen out: the blood- 

 heat of the system is reduced below the temperature which is a con- 

 dition of their development. The quinine-treatment is an attempt to 

 poison them. For a time that attempt may prove successful, but the 

 patient becomes a slave to his drug, and, till frost sets in, one of the 

 most nauseous of all medicines has to be applied from week to week, 

 and generally in increasing doses. But, if the febrile diathesis has 

 been subdued by a refrigerating diet, the most ordinary precautions 

 suffice to keep the disease in abeyance. The cause has been re- 

 moved. I will venture the prediction that the zymotic agency of cli- 

 matic fevers, as of tuberculosis, will be traced to the development of a 

 living organism, and I suspect that Nature's effort to eliminate the 

 tainted humors constitutes the critical symptoms of the affection, while 

 the periodicity of the disease is due to the periodical redevelopment of 

 the parasites from their ova or vital rudiments. In the vomit of cruor 

 that precedes the crisis of yellow fever, the system seems to make an 

 attempt to eradicate the evil by a direct extrusion of the tainted par- 

 ticles of the blood (the fibrine and red corpuscles), at the risk of 

 exhausting the vital pabulum by the impoverishment of the humors. 

 The success of that heroic remedy ends the trouble : yellow fever 



* Six parts of sulphate of soda and four parts of hydrochloric acid make an effective 

 freezing mixture. The first piece of ice thus obtained can be used with common salt to 

 continue the freezing process, and, mixed in a tin cup, will reduce the temperature of 

 water in a smaller cup, immersed in the mixture, by as much as thirty degrees. 



