Volume 4 — AN ACCOUNT OF THE MEASLES, AS THEY APPEARED IN PHILADELPHIA, IN THE YEAR 1801.

I. The disease wore the livery of the autumnal fever in the following particulars.

It was strongly marked by remissions and intermissions. The exacerbations came on chiefly at night.

There were in many cases a constant nausea, and discharge of bile by puking.

I saw one case in which the disease appeared with a violent cholera morbus, and several in which it was accompanied with diarrhœa and dysentery.

II. Many severe cases of phrenzy, and two of cynanche trachealis appeared with the measles.

III. A distressing sore mouth followed them, in a child of two years old, that came under my care.

IV. A fatal hydrocephalus internus followed them in a boy of eight years old, whom I saw two days before he died.

V. I met with a few cases in which the fever and eruption came on in the same day, but I saw one case in which the eruption did not take place until the tenth, and another, in which it did not appear until the fourteenth day after the fever.

VI. Two children had pustules on their skins, resembling the small-pox, before the eruption of the measles.

VII. Many children had coughs and watery eyes, but without the measles. The same children had them two or three weeks afterwards.

VIII. Many people who had had the measles, had coughs during the prevalence of the measles, resembling the cough which occurs in that disease.

The remedies made use of in my practice were,

1. Bleeding, from four to sixty ounces, according to the age of the patient, and the state of the pulse. This remedy relieved the cough, eased the pains in the head, and in one case produced, when used a third time, an immediate eruption of the measles.

2. Lenient purges.

3. Demulcent drinks.

4. Opiates at night.

5. Blisters. And,

6. Astringent medicines, where a diarrhœa took place.

I saw evident advantages from advising a vegetable diet to many children, as soon as any one of the families to which they belonged were attacked by the measles.

I lost but one patient in this disease, and that was a child in convulsions. I ascribed my success to bleeding more generally and more copiously than I had been accustomed to do, in the measles of former years.