Pneumonia.--Pneumonia is another of these sharply self-limited diseases that give opportunity to many remedies for the acquisition of a reputation as cures. Croupous pneumonia is so disturbing in its onset, so rapid in its progress, yet so strictly self-limited in the previously strong and healthy, that in the old days there were many remedies that were supposed to bring about the crisis. The old text-books contain so many cures that it is surprising pneumonia should have continued to be the fatal disease it has been at all times. Almost any remedy that is used for three or four days in pneumonia will be followed by the crisis with, in most cases, a favorable termination. The crisis takes place some time from the seventh to the tenth or eleventh day, and often we do not see a pneumonia patient until the second or third day of the disease. Just before the crisis the patient runs into a series of acute and more or less alarming symptoms. Often there is much restlessness, difficulty of breathing with complaint of heaviness, and perhaps prostration. The pulse and temperature are high, the skin hot and dry. Then in the midst of this the patient sleeps, there is a critical sweat, the temperature drops, the patient wakes up feeling quite well, there is little difficulty in breathing, and he feels that recovery is sure to come. The change is so great that it is natural that it should have been attributed to all sorts of remedies which had been used immediately preceding the crisis. I once heard an old physician declare at a meeting of a large and important medical society that calomel in divided doses was practically a specific for pneumonia. He said he waited forty-eight hours to be sure that the affection was pneumonia, and also that it had reached that diffusion in the lungs beyond which it was not likely to go, then he gave the calomel. He said that, almost as a rule, during the next forty-eight hours the crisis came--and he attributed it to the calomel. We have had other remedies just as curious as this recommended and taken quite seriously. Some years ago a {23} Russian physician, who had been treating soldiers in the Russian army for the pneumonia which occurs so commonly after exposure on the Steppes, announced that he had found in digitalis almost a specific. He pushed the tincture up to twenty drops three times a day, beginning it just as soon as the pneumonia was detected, and the rate of mortality among his patients was about one per cent. According to his theory, it was the failure of the heart in pneumonia that made the disease fatal.