Volume 23 — WHOOPING COUGH.

According to Dr. Sturges, an English physician, whooping cough is not always to be escaped by preventing contagion, for at a certain age the disposition toward this disease is so great that the child will originate it. He says: "Whooping cough is a nervous disease of immature life, due immediately, like nervous asthma, to a morbid exaltation of sensibility of the bronchial mucous membrane. Although possible in a modified form at all ages, it has its period of special liability and full development simultaneously with that time of life when the nervous system is irritable and the mechanism of respiration diaphragmatic. A child of the proper age with catarrh and cough is thus on the very brink of whooping cough. A large proportion of such children will develop the disease for themselves upon casual provocation, all contagion and all epidemic influence apart." Therefore he does not think contagion plays the important part generally supposed, and the assumption of a specific morbid poison is in his opinion entirely gratuitous. As to treatment he says:

"The specific remedies for whooping cough (which have their season and may be said now to include all drugs whatever of any potency) have all of them a certain testimony in their favor. They agree in a single point: whether by their nauseousness, the grievous method of their application, or the disturbance they bring to the child's habits and surroundings, the best vaunted remedies—emetics, sponging of the larynx, ill-flavored inhalation, change of scene, beating with the rod—all are calculated to impress the patient, and find their use accordingly.