st.

The disease is particularly prevalent among negroes, perhaps because
they are seldom vaccinated, and in recent epidemics in New York State it
has been chiefly through negroes that the disease has been kept alive.
The method of prevention for this disease is almost entirely
vaccination. Just how the disease spreads is not clearly understood,
although it is supposed that it is transmitted chiefly by clothing,
dishes, and other articles in contact with the infection. These should,
therefore, be thoroughly disinfected. The hope of eliminating the
disease, however, comes rather in the use of vaccination. In New York
State, in 1908, only two deaths from smallpox occurred, although twenty
years before, with the smaller population, the number of deaths ran up
into the hundreds.

_Treatment of smallpox._

The actual treatment of a case of smallpox consists in little more than
providing suitable food, in sponging the body to reduce the fever, and
in anointing the skin to allay the irritation of the pustules. As in
measles, the eyes are badly affected, and a darkened room is essential
for the comfort of the patient as well as for the avoidance of permanent
injury to the eyes. Carbolic acid solutions or ointments are to be used
continually on the surface of the body, relieving the irritation and to
some extent preventing pitting, which is a lasting mark of the disease.

_Diphtheria._

Diphtheria was also formerly a much-dreaded disease, physicians standing
helpless before severe attacks and in all cases unable to do more than
suggest ameliorating remedies.

The disease usually begins with a cold, sore throat, and local
inflammation, which develops sometimes with alarming rapidity. In the
days of our grandmothers, the first thing that the anxious mother did
when a child complained of sore throat was to get a spoon and look for
white patches in the back of the throat. With severe cases of diphtheria
which these white patches foretold, the growths of membrane would be so
rapid as to obstruct the breathing, and the child--for the disease is
preeminently one of childhood would be in danger of dying of
strangulation. The doctor's remedy for this condition was to make an
incision in the throat below this accumulation and insert a tube through
which the breathing might continue. The writer will never forget having
lived through a sickness and death of this sort in his family, seeing as
a boy a bottleful of the membrane which th