The hair should be closely cut at an early period of the disease, and so kept throughout its continuance.  This will contribute very much to the comfort of the child, by preventing the hair becoming matted together with the discharge from the pustules when they break, which gives rise to great pain and irritation.  In the confluent and worst forms of this disease, this measure it is particularly necessary to attend to, as also to the application of cold lotions to the head when hot and dry (with other remedial means), as there is always a tendency in these cases to the formation of abscesses, the healing of which is troublesome and attended with difficulty.

Cautions, etc.—­It has already been stated that a free ventilation of the bed-room is necessary to the well-doing of the patient.  This measure, however, must not be confined to the chamber of the sick, but acted upon through the whole house.

In conjunction with ventilation, fumigations by means of aromatic substances kept slowly burning should be resorted to.  A solution of the chloride of lime too, a most powerful disinfectant, should be used to purify the different apartments.  This is best accomplished by steeping in the solution pieces of linen, and hanging them about the rooms, as also frequently and freely sprinkling the walls themselves; and as soon as the invalid is removed, the chamber should be white-washed, the various articles of furniture well scoured with soap and water, and the room be well and freely ventilated prior to its being again occupied.

The clothes of the patient and the bed linen should be frequently removed, and when taken away immediately immersed in boiling water, and whilst hung up in the open air sprinkled occasionally with a weak solution of the chloride of lime.  If these directions are not observed, and the clothes are closely wrapped up, they will retain and give out the disease to others at a great distance of time.

Again:  as the contagious property of smallpox hangs about the child as long as any scabs remain (which indeed may be said to retain the poison in its concentrated form), a parent must be most careful that the invalid is not too early brought in contact with the healthy members of the family.

An observance of these precautions is imperatively demanded; they not only protect the healthy, but aid the infected.

Sect.  VIII.—­Hooping-cough.

My chief inducement to notice the above disorder arises out of the well-known fact, that there is no complaint of childhood more frequently subjected to quackery and mismanagement than is this.  Indeed, there are few maladies against which a greater array and variety of means have been recommended, than against hooping-cough.

I suppose from the circumstance of the simple and mild form of the complaint being so tractable (provided it remain such) that the simplest and mildest measures effect its cure, parents are tempted to undertake its management in the more severe and complicated forms; and the result is but too often the establishment of disease dangerous to life, and sometimes fatal to it.