The mismanagement of the convalescence consists chiefly in allowing the patient to rise too early from bed, and to take solid food too soon and in too large a quantity; and these are by far the most frequent causes of relapse. Were I to place on record all the instances I have seen of fatal relapse from these two causes alone, the list would be frightful. Many patients, the very day they become convalescent, think they ought to be allowed to get up. They feel well, they think they are so; they earnestly declare that they are so. They are impatient of bed; they imagine it keeps them weak: “if you would but allow me to rise how thankful I should be; how much more it would refresh and strengthen me than any thing that can now be done.” Such is the language which is constantly addressed to the physician in the early period of convalescence, and if he be weak enough to yield to it and allow his patient to rise, it is a chance if he ever rise again. The most cautious and experienced physician sometimes finds himself deceived, falling into the same error with his patient, and thinking him stronger than he is. Whenever this happens, the physician has great reason for self-reproach, _because he ought to allow no risk to be run_. Often, however, in private practice, the physician is allowed to have no control whatever over the management of the convalescence—he is dismissed as soon as the patient is out of apparent and urgent danger; dismissed hastily, often to be more hastily recalled to witness the death of him whom every one thought to be well. But if merely rising from bed at too early a period occasion the death of great numbers, eating heartily of solid food is a still more frequent and certain cause of it. The appetite is generally keen immediately after fever has subsided: if animal food be allowed as soon as the appetite craves for it relapse is sure to be produced. Often and often have I seen fatal cerebral and abdominal inflammation excited in a few hours after the commission of this error. I do not expect, by any language at my command, to communicate to others my own conviction of its danger. I know that such a conviction can be produced in no one who has not an opportunity of observing the convalescence of large numbers; and I know that no one who has such an opportunity can be without it. There are three conditions under which this danger is peculiarly imminent. First, when the disease has been unusually severe and protracted. The more intense the fever and the longer it has lasted, the more are all the organs enfeebled, and the longer do they retain the irritability of weakness, In this state, anything beyond the gentlest stimulus will induce vascular excitement, which will rapidly pass into inflammation.