This disease has been long known, and has proved very fatal in crowded and badly-aired hospitals. It may break out at any season, but hot, sultry, and damp weather is most favourable to it. No breach of surface, however small, is secure from its attack. The wound becomes painful and swollen, and loses its healthy, florid appearance; the granulations are flabby, and appear as if distended with air; vesicles form, containing serum or a bloody fluid; the pain is stinging; the secretions are suspended; and the wound is either altogether dry, or covered with slimy, tenacious, and peculiarly offensive matter. An ichorous discharge follows, the pain increases. The sore assumes a circular form, and its edges are everted; erysipelas attacks the surrounding integuments, often extending over the whole limb, and forming a principal feature of the disease. In fact, violent erysipelas and hospital gangrene are affections very closely allied to each other, often arising at the same time, and from the same causes. Both are accompanied with great constitutional disturbance; but in erysipelas, this generally precedes, whilst in hospital gangrene, it follows, the appearance of the malady. The lymphatic glands, in the neighbourhood of the gangrenous part, inflame and suppurate, the skin gives way, and the gangrene soon seizes the newly-formed sore. Fever supervenes, the pulse is often full and strong, and the surface hot; there is great nausea and thirst; the tongue is brown, and the bowels much disordered. The inflammation and ichorous discharge increase. A thick slough covers the sore, and its fetor is peculiar and intolerable. The burning pain is excruciating. Blood oozes out, and, in the last stage, the hemorrhage is often copious from large vessels exposed by the ravages of the disease. Now, extensive mortification occurs, the strength fails, the pulse becomes tremulous and indistinct, the features collapse, the surface is bedewed with a cold sweat, diarrhœa and hiccough come on, and death puts an end to the patient’s suffering. Such is the progress of the disease in those who were previously in perfect health. Often, however, it is attended with typhoid symptoms almost from the beginning, in people whose constitutions are wasted, who have long laboured under disease, or who have been long confined in hospital. The important distinction between these cases must influence the treatment; what succeeds in the one will destroy in the other. It is not the name of the disease which is to be combated, but each symptom as soon as it presents itself.