ove the
smile from her face and the blood from her lips. Not quite so common,
not so inevitable as a prospect, but, as a possibility, full of terror,
once its poison had passed the gates of the body fortress. The fight
between the Angel of Life and the Angel of Death was waged on almost
equal terms, with none daring to say which would be the victor, and none
able to lift a hand with any certainty to aid.

Nor was the doctor in much happier plight. Even when the life at stake
was not one of his own loved ones,--though from the deadly
contagiousness of the disease it sadly often was (I have known more
doctors made childless by diphtheria than by any other disease except
tuberculosis),--he faced his cases by the hundred instead of by twos and
threes. The feeling of helplessness, the sense of foreboding, with which
we faced every case was something appalling. Few of us who have been in
practice twenty years or more, or even fifteen, will ever forget the
shock of dismay which ran through us whenever a case to which we had
been summoned revealed itself to be diphtheria. Of course, there was a
fighting chance, and we made the most of it; for in the milder epidemics
only ten to twenty per cent of the patients died, and even in the
severest a third of them recovered. But what "turned our liver to
water"--as the graphic Oriental phrase has it--was the knowledge which,
like Banquo's ghost, would not down, that while many cases would recover
of themselves, and in many border-line ones our skill would turn the
balance in favor of recovery, yet if the disease happened to take a
certain sadly familiar, virulent form we could do little more to stay
its fatal course than we could to stop an avalanche, and we never knew
when a particular epidemic or a particular case would take that turn.
"Black" diphtheria was as deadly as the Black Death of the Middle Ages.

The disease which caused all this terror and havoc is of singular
character and history. It is not a modern invention or development, as
is sometimes believed, for descriptions are on record of so-called
"Egyptian ulcer of the throat" in the earliest centuries of our era; and
it would appear to have been recognized by both Hippocrates and Galen.
Epidemics of it also occurred in the Middle Ages; and, coming to more
recent times, one of the many enemies which the Pilgrim Fathers had to
fight was a series of epidemics of this "black sore throat," of
particularly malignant character,