In the advanced periods of Consumption, diarrhœa constitutes a prominent and troublesome symptom. This is sometimes produced by any cause which checks the profuse sweats; while on the other hand, if the diarrhœa be checked, the cough and dyspnœa, which perhaps had been relieved by it, frequently return with redoubled violence. Under these circumstances, the condition of the patient is hopeless indeed. The approach of summer frequently mitigates the sufferings of the consumptive, and gives them hopes of returning health; but when winter returns, these hopes are blasted; the patient sinks again into his former condition, and most generally is cut off during the cold season. The symptoms of Phthisis are frequently suspended or mitigated by any cause producing a new determination in the system. The most prominent of these causes is pregnancy. It almost invariably happens that the symptoms of Consumption are relieved by the occurrence of this event; but after parturition the disease returns with all its former violence. The occurrence of mania has produced the same effect, and has even entirely cured the disease; but generally, when the mania is removed, the symptoms of Consumption return. An attack of rheumatism has frequently relieved phthisical complaints. Dr. Rush refers to three clinical patients in the hospital of Pennsylvania to exemplify this observation. In the same manner gout is observed to alternate with Consumption, and during its paroxysms, the complaint of the lungs is relieved. Frequent cases are related, in works on this subject, of eruptions on the skin alternating with Phthisis Pulmonalis. Long continued ulcers, or fistulæ in ano not unfrequently relieve pulmonic complaints in phthisical patients; while the healing of these ulcers or fistulæ reproduces the disease with tenfold violence. A farther circumstance worthy of remark in this disease is, the willingness with which the patient suffers himself to be flattered with hopes of recovery. Notwithstanding he sees daily victims of Consumption falling around him; notwithstanding the perfect assurance he has of the small number of those who recover from it; to the last his hopes are not abandoned. Although depressed at night by the evening exacerbation of hectic fever; in the morning, from his comparatively comfortable situation, his hopes revive. Happy is it for these miserable sufferers that they do not despair. In a disease whose progress is frequently so slow, and whose event is but too often so sure, fortunate it is, that a solace remains to cheer the unhappy patient. The duration of Consumption is extremely various; from a few weeks to fifty years have patients laboured under it. In Bayle’s statement of the duration of the disease in two hundred cases in which the patients were destroyed by it, it was between two months and two years in 168 cases, four were less than two months, and 28 remained more than two years.