If every case of cold or sore throat were promptly and thoroughly treated with antiseptic sprays and washes such as any competent physician can direct his patients to keep in the house, in readiness for such an emergency, combined with laxatives and intestinal antiseptic treatment, and, above all, with rest in bed as long as any rise of temperature is present, there would be a marked diminution in both the frequency and the severity of rheumatism. If to this were added an abundant and nutritious dietary, good ventilation and pure air, an avoidance of overwork and overstrain, we should soon begin to get the better of this distressing disease. In fact, while positive data are lacking, on account of the small fatality of rheumatism and its consequent infrequent appearance among the causes of death in our vital statistics, yet it is the almost unanimous opinion of physicians of experience that the disease is distinctly diminishing, as a result of the marked improvement in food, housing, wages, and living conditions generally, which modern civilization has already brought about. So much for acute rheumatism. Vague and unsatisfactory as is our knowledge of it, it is, unfortunately, clearness and precision itself when contrasted with the welter of confusion and fog which covers our ideas about the _chronic_ variety. The catholicity of the term is something incredible. Every chronic pain and twinge, from corns to locomotor ataxia, and from stone-in-the-kidney to tic-douloureux, has been put down as "rheumatism." It is little better than a diagnostic garbage-dump or dust-heap, where can be shot down all kinds of vague and wandering pains in joints, bones, muscles, and nerves, which have no visible or readily ascertainable cause. Probably at least half of all the discomforts which are put down as "rheumatism" of the ankle, the elbow, the shoulder, are not rheumatism at all, in any true or reasonable sense of the term, but merely painful symptoms due to other perfectly definite disease conditions of every imaginable sort. The remaining half may be divided into two great groups of nearly equal size. One of these, like acute rheumatism, is closely related to, and probably caused by, the attack of acute infections of milder character, falling upon less favorable soil. The other is of a vaguer type and is due, probably, to the accumulation of poisonous waste-products in the tissues, setting up irritative and even inflammatory changes in nerve, muscle, and joint. Either of these may be made worse by exposure to cold or changes in the weather. In fact, this is the type of rheumatism which has such a wide reputation as a barometer and weather prophet, second only to that of the United States Signal Service. When you "feel it in your bones," you know it is going to snow, or to rain, or to clear up, or become cloudy, or whatever else may happen to follow the sensation, merely because all poisoned and irritated nerves are more sensitive to