It cannot be too strongly impressed on the minds of parents that there is no specific whatever for hooping-cough; no remedy which will cut it short, as quinine cuts short a fit of ague. The domestic treatment of mild hooping-cough is the domestic treatment of a common cold, implying the same precautions as to the equal temperature of the day and night nursery, the little doses of ipecacuanha at night, but as seldom as possible during the day, in order not to interfere with the appetite and digestion, together with special care to insure the regular action of the bowels. It sometimes happens that after a week or two the severer fits of coughing are followed by vomiting; and the child may lose flesh and strength from inability to retain its food. In these circumstances food must be given, little in quantity, at short intervals, and of a kind that need not remain long in the stomach in order to be digested. Good soup, beef-tea, milk, rice milk, or a raw egg beaten up in milk, and biscuit rather than bread, must take the place of the ordinary meals, and be given twice as often. The different liniments, and the favourite Roche's Embrocation, are of use when the disease is on the decline, and may also be of service if bronchitis should occur to complicate the hooping-cough, but not otherwise. Change of air when hooping-cough is on the decline is often of great service, and change even from good air to one less good appears to be sometimes of use; but change in the early stages, or when hooping-cough has become really severe, is but adding another to the already existing dangers. The danger in hooping-cough arises through the medium either of the head or of the lungs, and through each of them with about equal frequency. The head becomes affected in consequence of the often recurring congestion of the brain, produced, as in spasmodic croup, by the constantly returning interruption to the breathing. In these cases the cough is frequent, and so violent that the child becomes livid during each paroxysm, and that instead of ending in a loud hoop it finishes by a fit of convulsions or by the child sinking into a state of semi-insensibility. Increased violence of the cough, with suppression of the hoop, is always a bad omen in hooping-cough. On the other hand, when the cough becomes complicated with bronchitis, it ceases to recur in distinct fits which leave behind them intervals of comparative, or of absolute ease. The hurried breathing which precedes and follows a fit of coughing never entirely subsides, while each returning cough aggravates the irritation and inflammation of the air-tubes, and the child's condition becomes the very dangerous one of hooping-cough complicated with bronchitis.