elp you to decide whether his visit
is necessary. I may add that this form of consumptive disease is less
serious than that in which the lung-substance is involved.

Consumption sometimes follows bronchitis, especially when a child has
been subject to frequent attacks of it. A very slow and imperfect
recovery from an attack of bronchitis which had not been specially
severe is always a reason for solicitude.

Now and then infants are born with consumptive disease. In that case the
lungs are always affected; and the symptoms of fever, cough, and wasting
usually show themselves within the first three or four months, and the
infants almost invariably die within the year. Now and then, however, an
infant thus affected may continue apparently in good health for a few
months, and then be suddenly attacked by symptoms of acute inflammation
or of severe bronchitis which prove rapidly fatal; and it may be found
after death that the acute attack destroyed life because the lungs were
already the seat of extensive consumptive disease.

No infant in whose mother's family a predisposition to consumption
exists ought to be nursed by its mother, but by a healthy wet nurse; or,
if that is impossible, it should be brought up on a milk diet, with but
a small admixture of farinaceous food.

There is a form of very rapid, or so-called galloping consumption, which
is seldom observed before the age of seven years; generally two or three
years later. Its symptoms so closely resemble those of typhoid fever,
that it may readily be mistaken for it. I refer to it in order to say
that the doctor who mistakes the one for the other can scarcely be
regarded as blameworthy; and the mistake is of the less importance since
the treatment applicable to the one case would do no harm in the other.

I have already noticed the connection between water on the brain and
consumption. It is indeed nothing else than inflammation excited by the
presence of the deposit of consumptive matter in the brain or its
membranes.

Little has been said hitherto about the wasting which was referred to as
one of the characteristics of consumption. When the disease is limited,
or nearly so, to the lungs, the wasting is not considerable until the
mischief in the chest is far advanced. It must be remembered, however,
in order to judge of this, that while in the full-grown man the best
sign of health is the persistence for years together of the same weight,
the case of the chil