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to succumb. Fatalities usually result from complications or sequels, such as pneumonia or tuberculosis; neurasthenia or insanity may follow.

Symptoms. There are commonly four important symptoms characteristic of grippe: fever; pain, catarrh; and depression, mental and physical. Grippe attacks the patient with great suddenness. While in perfect health and engaged in ordinary work, one is often seized with a severe chill followed by general depression, pain in the head, back, and limbs, soreness of the muscles, and fever. The temperature varies from 100° to 104° F. The catarrh attacks the eyes, nose, throat, and larger tubes in the lungs. The eyes become reddened and sensitive to light, and movements of the eyeballs cause pain. Sneezing comes on early, and, after a day or two, is followed by discharge from the nose. The throat is often sore and reddened. There may be a feeling of weight and tightness in the chest accompanied by a harsh, dry cough, which, after a few days, becomes looser and expectoration occurs. Bodily weakness and depression of spirits are usually prominent and form often the most persistent and distressing symptoms.

After three or four days the pains decrease, the temperature falls, and the cough and oppression in the chest lessen, and recovery usually takes place within a week, or ten days, in serious cases. The patient should go to bed at once, and should not leave it until the temperature is normal (983° F.). For some time

afterwards general weakness, associated with heart weakness, causes the patient to sweat easily, and to get out of breath and have a rapid pulse on slight exertion.

Such is the picture of a typical case, but it often happens that some of the symptoms are absent, while others are exaggerated so that different types of grippe are often described. Thus the pain in the back and head may be so intense as to resemble that of meningitis. Occasionally the stomach and bowels are attacked so that violent vomiting and diarrhea occur, while other members of the same family present the ordinary form of influenza. There is a form that attacks principally the nervous system, the nasal and bronchial tracts escaping altogether. Continual fever is the only symptom in some cases. Grippe may last for weeks. Whenever doubt exists as to the nature of the disorder, a microscopic examination of the expectoration or of the mucus from the throat by a competent physician will definitely determine the existence of influenza, if the special germs of that disease are found. It is the prevailing and erroneous fashion for a person to call any cold in the head the grippe; and there are, indeed, many cases in which it becomes difficult for a physician to distinguish between grippe and a severe cold with muscular soreness and fever, except by the microscopic test. Influenza becomes dangerous chiefly through its complications, as pneumonia, inflammation of the middle ear, of the eyes, or of the

kidneys, and through its depressing effect upon the heart.

These complications can often be prevented by avoiding the slightest imprudence or exposure during convalescence. Elderly and feeble persons should be protected from contact with the disease in every way. Whole prisons have been exempt from grippe during epidemics, owing to the enforced seclusion of the inmates. The one absolutely essential feature in treatment is that the patient stay in bed while the fever lasts and in the house afterwards, except as his strength will permit him to go out of doors for a time each sunny day until recovery is fully established.

Treatment. The medicinal treatment consists at first in combating the toxin of the disease and assuaging pain, and later in promoting strength. Hot lemonade and whisky may be given during the chilly period and a single six- to ten-grain dose of quinine. Pain is combated by phenacetin,1 three grains repeated every three hours till relieved. At night a most useful medicine to afford comfort when pain and sleep·lessness are troublesome, is Dover's powder, ten grains (or codeine, one grain), with thirty grains of sodium bromide dissolved in water. After the first day it is usually advisable to give a two-grain quinine pill to gether with a tablet containing one-thirtieth of a grain of strychnine three times a day after meals for a week or two as a tonic (adult). Only mild cathartics are 1 Caution. A powerful medicine.

suitable to keep the bowels regular as a Seidlitz powder in the morning before breakfast. The diet should be liquid while the fever lasts-as milk, cocoa, soups, eggnog, one of these each two hours. A tablespoonful of whisky, rum, or brandy may be added to the milk three times daily if there is much weakness.

The germ causing grippe lives only two days, but successive crops of spores are raised in a proper medium. Neglected mucus in nose or throat affords an inviting field for the germ. Therefore it is essential to keep the nostrils free and open by means of spraying with the Seiler's tablet solution (p. 49), and then always breathing through the nostrils.

CHAPTER IV

Headaches

Treatment of Sick Headache-Effects of Indigestion-NeuralgiaHeadaches Occasioned by Disease—Other Causes-Poisoning -Heat Stroke.

HEADACHE varies according to its nature and causes. The first variety to be considered is "sick headache" or migraine.

SICK HEADACHE.-This is a peculiar, one-sided headache which takes the form of severe, periodic attacks or paroxysms, and is often inherited. It recurs at more or less regular intervals, as on a certain day of each week, fortnight or month, and the attacks appear and disappear at regular hours. The disorder generally persists for years and then goes away. If it begins in childhood, as it frequently does between the years of five and ten, it may stop with the coming of adult life, but if not outgrown at this time it commonly vanishes during late middle life, about the age of fifty-one in a man, or with the "change of life” in a woman. While in many instances arising without apparent cause, yet in others sick headache may be precipitated by indigestion, by eye-strain, by enlarged tonsils and adenoids in children, or by fatigue.

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