Note 36 — TREATMENT OF SCARLET-FEVER.

Nothing is more dangerous to the interest of an establishment, where many people are promiscuously collected, than a case of contagious disease, such as small-pox, scarlatina, measles, typhus, &c. I remember a hydriatic establishment in Pennsylvania being broken up entirely, and the physician deprived for a time of the means of subsistence, by his honest and well-founded confidence in the hydriatic treatment of small-pox, and by the generous steps he took in taking a friendless patient, afflicted with that dreaded disease, to his own house, to cure him. He anticipated the pleasure it would procure him to show how quickly and how safely he would dispose of the case, and exulted in being able to communicate the fact to his patients. Alas, he little knew, how feeble their confidence in the water-cure was as yet, and how much more they thought of their own safety, than of the water-cure, their physician and the life and health of a poor destitute fellow-creature. They all left him—part of them came to Florence—and long before he had cured his small-pox patient, he had not one of his old patients left to witness the cure! However impolitic it may appear, I cannot but express my admiration of Dr. S.'s noble conduct on the occasion, who proved himself not only an honest adherer to our excellent mode of treatment, but also a kind and generous man, worthy of more encouragement than he received at the time.

With that event before me and with a number of some thirty-five or forty patients in the house, I, of course, tried to make them as easy as I could, and confiding in the power of my treatment, sent my own two children, Paul, about eight and a half, and Eliza, about four years old, to play with the little scarlet-patient, to show how little I was afraid of the disease. In doing so, I, at the same time, satisfied my own heart, by insuring the possibility of treating my darlings myself for scarlatina, which I might not be able to do, were I to let the opportunity escape. Both were taken by the disease, and finding their reaction rather torpid, and the whole process of the disease not without danger, I was glad—when all was over—that I had been able to treat them myself.

I am happy to declare, that none of my patients were frightened away, and that all those who were attacked by the contagion, came off in a very short time and without the least bad consequences. The only exception, in the case of a person who was not a patient, and who came under my hands, after other remedies had been tried on him, I shall communicate hereafter.