PROGNOSIS.--The disease is rarely directly fatal during the attack, yet as the frequency of the complications varies unaccountably from time to time, so the mortality may be exceptionally large or small for even prolonged periods. It may be said that the average mortality ranges between 1.16 and 4 per cent. in the experience of modern authors. The average mortality in the Paris hospitals for four years (1868-69, 1872-73) Besnier fixes at 1.65 per cent.;[122] in St. Bartholomew's, London, Southey found it for fifteen years (1861-75) to be 1.16 per cent.;[123] Pye-Smith fixes the rate at 4 per cent. in 400 cases treated in Guy's;[124] W. Carter gives 2.5 per cent. as the rate during ten years at the Southern and Royal Southern Hospitals of Liverpool.[125] The death-rate appears to vary remarkably with age, as Southey's figures show:[126] under ten years, 3.40 per cent.; between ten and fifteen, 1.5 per cent.; between fifteen and twenty-five, 1.4 per cent.; between twenty-five and thirty-five, 0.9 per cent.; between thirty-five and forty-five, 0.8 per cent., the mortality declining very greatly after the tenth, after the twenty-fifth, and after the forty-fifth year of life. [Footnote 122: _Dictionnaire Encyclopédique_, Troisième serie, t. iv., p. 463.] [Footnote 123: _Barth. Hospital Reports_, vol. xiv., p. 4.] [Footnote 124: _Guy's Hospital Reports_, xix. p. 327.] [Footnote 125: _The Liverpool Medico-Chirurgical Journal_, July, 1881, p. 88.] [Footnote 126: _Lib. cit._, p. 4.]