[14]
fat is so far from rendering the disease more violent, especially in children, that I think I have generally found such subjects have the small-pox more favourably than others.
Moderate exercise in the open air should be used during the preparation. But hard labour, and every thing that promotes sweat or fatigue, as also the extremes of heat and cold, should be avoided.
IV. We come now to consider the treatment of the body during the eruptive fever. On the eighth day after inoculation our patients are generally seized with the common symptoms of fever. Sometimes this fever appears on the sixth and seventh day after inoculation. But when it is irregular, it is often delayed till the ninth and tenth days. I have seen many instances of it on the fourteenth, a few on the fifteenth and sixteenth, and one cafe in which it did not come on till the eighteenth day after the infection was communicated to the body[1]. The place where the puncture was made with the lancet, or needle, generally serves as an harbinger of the approaching fever.
- ↑ Since the publication of the first edition of this lecture, I have heard of two cases, in one of which the fever did not come on till the twentieth, and in the other till the twenty-first day after the infection was communicated to the body. In some of these tedious cases, I have seen an inflammation and suppuration on the punctured part of the arm on the eighth day without a fever. Perhaps in these cases the inflammation and suppuration are only cuticular, and that the small-pox is taken from the matter which is formed by them.
