The Mother's Manual of Children's DiseasesWest, Charles
Science
The Mother's Manual of Children's Diseases
West, Charles
Pediatrics -- Handbooks, manuals, etc.
It is highly contagious, and for this reason perhaps it is usually met
with in infancy and early childhood. Sometimes, though by no means
constantly, the eruption is preceded for twenty-four or thirty-six hours
by slight feverishness; but oftener the appearance of the rash is the
first indication of anything being the matter. It shows itself in the
form of small pimples, which in a few hours change into small circular
pocks containing a little slightly turbid fluid. They appear on the
forehead, face, and body, but very rarely on the limbs; they enlarge for
some two or at most three days, then shrivel and dry up; and at the end
of a week the crusts or scabs fall off, scarcely ever causing any
permanent pitting of the skin. They are usually not above twenty or
thirty in number, though every now and then they are much more numerous
without any obvious reason. Their distinction from the small-pox
eruption consists not only in the smaller size of the pocks, and in the
entirely different course which they run, but also in the fact that two
or three successive crops of the eruption appear in the course of five
or six days, so that new ones, those at maturity, and those on which the
crusts have already formed, or from which they have already fallen, may
be seen on the child at the same time. This is sufficient of itself to
establish the difference between the two diseases, and also to
distinguish between chicken-pox and the milder variety of small-pox
which is sometimes observed in children who have been already
vaccinated.
=Measles= is a disease with which almost everyone is familiar, and one
which with proper care is not generally attended with danger. Its great
risks are twofold; first, that of its being complicated with bronchitis,
or inflammation of the lungs during its progress, and next of its being
followed by an imperfect recovery, and by the awakening into activity
any tendency to scrofulous or consumptive disease. On these two accounts
the disease is not to be made light of, and special watchfulness is to
be exercised during the whole time of convalescence. It is also unwise
when one child in a family is attacked by measles to expose the others,
as is often done, to its contagion, in order, as people say, 'to get it
over;' for its mildness in one case furnishes no guarantee of its
mildness in another, and the danger of the disease is almost in exact
proportion to the tender age of those who are attacked by it.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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