Page:Tropical Diseases.djvu/431

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XXIII]
SEVEN-DAYS' FEVER
389

better may be looked for about the end of the third week. Convalescence is very gradual, and it may be six weeks before temperature is normal. Half the cases die.

A curious feature is the remarkable rapidity with which the blood coagulates the moment it is exposed to the air.

Malaria parasites, though carefully sought for, have not been found; neither have attempts at cultivations from the blood yielded any micro-organism. The white corpuscles are rather in excess.

Treatment.— The only treatment which has been of value is the diligent use of the cold bath and the cold pack.

Seven-days' fever of Indian ports.— Definition.— A short fever occurring epidemically during the summer months in Indian ports, and characterized by sudden invasion, severe headache, pains in the back and limbs, and pyrexia of a peculiar saddle-back type— occasionally of a continued— type lasting from six to seven days and associated with a pulse which is relatively slow in relation to temperature.

History.— Possibly this fever is one of several fevers included under the somewhat comprehensive term "simple continued fever." Rogers, by a careful study of a vast number of cases of fever in Calcutta, observing that this particular type has a definite seasonal incidence— the late hot weather and the early monsoon months in Calcutta— and declines just at the time when the principal malarial rise of the year takes place, concludes from this and from the absence of malarial parasites that it cannot be malarial, from the absence of respiratory symptoms that it is not influenza, and from the absence of violent joint-pains and eruption that it cannot be dengue. He cultivated a bacillus from the blood, but did not succeed in establishing any causal relationship of the organism to the disease. He further states that it usually begins amongst the sailors and spreads later to the townspeople; that it occurs in other Indian ports, but is probably