*Prophylactic Treatment.*--The prophylactic treatment of smallpox is of vastly more importance than any therapeutic measure, since it concerns a community and not merely an individual. In dealing with smallpox cases many physicians discover only too late that an ounce of prevention is worth many pounds of cure. When a case of smallpox is first recognized, or even suspected, the patient should be isolated in a room from which all unnecessary articles of furniture, especially of soft texture, have been removed. A sheet moistened with some volatile disinfectant should be hung before the door, and no one allowed to enter the room save the nurse and doctor. A change of clothing should be made outside by the former whenever leaving the room, and a gown should be ready for the latter to wear at each visit. Upon leaving the sick-room the physician should carefully disinfect his hands and remain for some time in the fresh air before making another call. When the diagnosis is positively made, all who have come in contact with the patient, unless manifestly immune, should be found and vaccinated without delay. During the course of the disease all discharges, such as fæces, urine, sputa, or vomited matter, should be received in glass or earthen vessels containing a five per cent. solution of carbolic acid. Handkerchiefs and soiled rags should be burned or with towels and soiled sheets placed in a carbolic solution and allowed to remain for twelve hours. The plates, knives, forks, and spoons used by the patient should be kept in the sick-room and washed in a disinfectant solution by the nurse, while any uneaten food should be treated in the same manner as the patient’s discharges. When the patient has fully recovered, and, after personal disinfection, has left the sick-room, this should be thoroughly fumigated. The mattress and bed-coverings should be burned or, in large cities, sent to the Board of Health for disinfection. In case of death the corpse should be washed with a strong bichloride solution or painted with carbolized oil (twenty per cent.), and buried or cremated as quickly as possible. The clothing worn by the patient at the beginning of the disease should be destroyed or disinfected by baking for an hour in an oven at a temperature of 220° F., or steamed for five minutes at a temperature of 212° F.