In popular estimation, rheumatism is one of the commonest of affections. When a physician asks a patient, especially if the patient is over forty years of age, "Have you ever suffered from rheumatism?" the almost invariable response is, "Yes", though but little further inquiry is needed to show that what the patient means is that he has suffered from some painful conditions in the neighborhood of his joints, or that his muscles have been sore or inclined to ache in rainy weather, or that he has undergone some other vague discomforts connected with dampness. Chronic rheumatism is a term that includes a great many of the most varied conditions. True rheumatism, that is, acute articular rheumatism, is now recognized as an infectious disease which runs a definite course, usually with {241} fever, for some ten days to ten weeks, and requires confinement to bed usually for a month or more. Very rarely will any connection be found between this affection, which presents always Galen's four classic symptoms of inflammation, swelling, redness, heat and pain (_tumor, rubor, color, et dolor_), and the usual conditions which are broadly characterized as rheumatism. Just as soon as patients are asked if their rheumatism included these symptoms there is denial, yet the idea of their having had rheumatism remains. As a matter of fact, there are a number of sore and painful conditions in connection with muscles and particularly in and around joints that have, without any scientific justification at least, been called chronic rheumatism. Any painful condition that is worse in rainy weather is sure to be so named. As old dislocations, sprains and wrenches of joints, broken bones, as well as muscular conditions of all kinds, including flat foot and other yielding of joints, all produce this effect, it is easy to understand that there is an immense jumble of all sorts of painful conditions included under the term "chronic rheumatism." Some of them, particularly in older people, produce lameness or at least inability to walk {242} distances without showing the disability; a great many of them produce distinct painful conditions during the night following the use of muscles and often disturb patients very much, because they arouse the dread that they are going to be crippled as they grow older.