It must not be forgotten that all these ailments have a special tendency to recur; and that when people say 'Dr. A. or Dr. B. did the child good for the time, but this or that symptom returned as soon as the treatment was discontinued,' as though this were the doctor's fault, they are unjust; for the tendency to return of every form of scrofulous disease is one of the great characteristics of the malady. Patience and perseverance on the parents' part, even for months and years, are often as much needed as skill on the part of the doctor. One more remark may not be out of place. Some persons have an impression that there is something specially shameful in scrofulous disease, and while they will readily admit the existence of a consumptive tendency in their family, they almost resent the suggestion that their child's ailment is scrofulous. For this prejudice there is absolutely no foundation. There is no more reason for connecting scrofula in a child with any antecedent wrong-doing on the part of its progenitors, than there is for attaching that idea to the red hair or black eyes which a child may have in common with the rest of its family. =Rickets.=--We sometimes see, especially in the poorer quarters of a great city, persons dwarfed in stature, with large hands, bowed legs, bent arms, swollen wrists and ankles, walking with an awkward gait, though usually holding themselves remarkably upright, with the face of a grown person on the body of a child, and we know that they suffered from _rickets_ when young. Rickets is essentially a disease of childhood, and of early childhood, in which proper bone-formation does not take place, the soft material, or gristle, which should turn to bone, remaining long in the soft state. When, therefore, the child begins to walk, or to use its limbs, they bend under the weight of the body, or under their own weight, and with every slight movement which its feeble muscular power enables it to make. It does more, however, than interfere with the hardening of the limbs: it arrests growth to a great degree, interferes with development, retards teething, postpones the closure of the open part of the head, or fontanelle, weakens constitutional vigour, and impairs muscular power. To this feeble muscular power it is due that the child cannot make the effort to fill its lungs completely, and hence the pressure of the external air forces the soft ribs inwards, and gives to the chest the peculiar form of pigeon-breast. In the course of time the delayed bone-formation takes place, and the bones themselves become as hard as ivory, but the limbs do not straighten, and the deformity produced in infancy is but confirmed in after-life.