For many years eminent medical savants have sought earnestly through the vegetable and mineral worlds for some substance by means of which the high temperature often prevailing in typhoid, malarial, and other fevers might be reduced with rapidity and safety to the patient.  A few substances have been found which produce a decline in temperature when administered in enormous and frequently repeated doses; but such administration has often been found to be decidedly detrimental to the patient, producing not infrequently serious injury to the stomach, kidneys, and sometimes the nervous system.  So great is the danger of such injurious results, few careful practitioners have cared to adopt the heroic “antipyretic” medication recommended by experimenters, preferring to allow their patients to burn with fever, mitigated only by such simple means as are commonly employed by nurses, than to require them to combat the poisonous influences of a drug in addition to the morbid element of the disease.

Happily, however, it is not necessary to leave the patient to the unaided efforts of nature.  By cool sponging of the surface, persistently and thoroughly applied; by large, cool compresses placed over the abdomen and chest, or even the whole front of the body, and changed as often as warm, or every three to five minutes; by frequently repeated cool packs; by cold water drinking; by ice-packs to the spine; by constant application of ice or frozen compresses to the head; by forcing perspiration by copious hot drinks and a warm blanket pack—­by any or all of these means the temperature may be reduced with promptness in nearly every case.  However, cases will now and then occur in which the temperature remains dangerously high, notwithstanding the thorough application of the above means.  What shall be done?

Several years ago our attention was called to a series of experiments made by Dr. Winternitz, Professor of Hydropathy in the Medical University of Vienna, for the purpose of determining the influence upon temperature of enemas of water of different temperature in cases of fever.  The results claimed by Prof.  Winternitz were so striking that we improved the first opportunity to repeat his experiments, and with such results as have justified the continued use of this means of lowering temperatures in fever, in cases in which the ordinary measures were not efficient.  The only objection we have found to the method has been the inconvenience to the patient occasioned by the frequent use of the bed-pan.  In a recent case in which we found it necessary to resort to this method, the nurse observed that if the tin can of the fountain syringe used in administering the enema happened to be lowered below the level of the bed on which the patient lay, water which had previously been introduced into the rectum returned readily through the tube into the can.  On learning this fact, the attendants were instructed to employ the enema in this way.  From one to two pints of water, of 70 deg. or 75 deg.