ACUTE RHEUMATISM, or RHEUMATIC FEVER, is a disease which, in many of its symptoms, strongly resembles inflammatory fever, and usually commences after the languor, restlessness, and shivering, which precede all febrile actions, and is attended with great heat, much thirst, headache, a quick bounding pulse, white tongue, constipated bowels, and acute pain either confined to one or two parts, or more generally diffused over the body. There is at the same time an oppression in the breathing, the abdomen is often tense and tumid, and the secretion from the bladder, scant, and of a deep red colour; while, from the surface of the body a perspiration breaks out, which, though unattended with relief, by its peculiar acid smell defines the disease, and affords a good diagnosis, before asking the patient a single question. Upon entering the room the air seems redolent of stale vinegar, and this fact, while helping the physician to a suggestion of the disease, serves to define the attack from inflammatory or any other form of fever. Another characteristic and distinctive symptom of this disease, is the increase of pain in the course of the muscles on any attempt to move the patient into another position. The symptoms, if from the first unrelieved, gradually increase in intensity; and the pulse in such cases becomes, in addition to its velocity, hard and jerking. In all cases the symptoms are aggravated at night, and remit their violence in the morning. The pain though sometimes intense, is not always continuous, it is often only partial in its situation, and sometimes abates for hours, but in all cases it is the _last_ symptom the patient loses. The disease after a course of from fifteen to thirty days subsides, often leaving one or more members in a state of chronic tumefaction. The causes that induce rheumatic fever, are generally exposure to cold damp air, or transitions from a warm moist atmosphere into a cold or wet one, and the period most liable to an attack is that of youth and vigorous manhood, the full-bodied and the active, rather than the spare and torpid; and men more frequently than women. The only other disease with which rheumatism can be confounded, is gout, and from this it can always be known by the indigestion and little constitutional disturbances which always precede gout; and lastly, by that disease attacking the _small joints_, as the toes or fingers, instead of, as in rheumatism, the shoulder, knee, or hip.