So we come to the present attack: When did it begin, and how? What have been its prominent symptoms since? Questions are then to be put concerning the heat of the body, appetite, complaint of pain, sleep, movement of the bowels, discharge of urine: in the female, menstruation; if married, pregnancy or parturition, how often and when occurring last. Thus the practitioner is enabled to get a clue to the diagnosis, to be followed out through his own observation and closer examination. If the patient be a child and the attack be acute and febrile, an early question must be as to its having passed or not through the different diseases of childhood--viz. the exanthemata, mumps, and whooping cough, and also what exposure to any of these it may have been recently subjected to. Going farther into particulars, let us review some of the possible developments obtained in the above questioning of symptoms. When lying in bed the decubitus may be significant, as, upon the back with the knees drawn up in peritonitis; with the hands pressing the abdomen in colic; tossing to and fro in the delirium of fever or of early cerebral inflammation; on one side constantly in acute inflammation of the liver or in pleurisy. Or the patient may be obliged to be propped in a sitting posture (orthopnoea) from heart-disease, asthma, or ascites, or leaning forward upon the back of a chair or a pillow with aneurism of the aorta. More remarkable still may be the subsultus tendinum of low fever, the opisthotonos of tetanus, the respiratory spasms of hydrophobia, or the clonic movements of epileptic, hysterical, or occasional convulsions. In the face we see pallor in syncope and in anæmia in any of its varieties and with varied associations; a general redness in some cases of apoplexy and in remittent fever; flushing of the forehead and eyes especially in yellow fever; dusky redness in typhus, and a more purple hue in typhoid fever; yellowness in jaundice, in some cases of remittent and in most of yellow fever; sallowness in cancer; a bright central glow upon each cheek in early pneumonia or the hectic of phthisis; a blue or ashen appearance in the collapse of cholera, and blackish-blue in {151} cyanosis or carbonic acid poisoning; bronzed in Addison's disease; puffy about the eyelids in Bright's disease; the surface swollen, yet resistant to the touch, in myxoedema. The eyes (one or both) glare prominently in exophthalmic goitre; squint in advanced cerebro-meningitis; roll to and fro often in the prostration of cholera infantum and in convulsions; are clear and bright in phthisis; yellowish in hepatic disorder; dull and clouded in low fevers; without expression in imbecility and general paralysis.