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chiefly
DISEASES OF THE GENERAL SYSTEM. 343
about the chest. Later, eruptions like flea-
bites are seen. In bad cases, toward the end of the
second week, the patient sinks into great weakness,
with tremors, picking of the bed-clothes, rapid pulse,
red, dry tongue, dark mucous matter around the teeth,
gloom and anxiety, low delirium, coma, brief convulsions,
death.
The severer form of typhus, called Putrid Fever,
Jail Fever, Ship Fever, is epidemic and contagious. It
is marked by alternations of heat and cold ; hot, dry,
harsh skin ; distress ; face turgid and dark, red flush ;
eyes heavy and red ; severe headache ; pulse small,
hard, tense, frequent, irregular ; tongue coated with
brown or yellowish fur ; nausea and retching ; bowels
torpid. In three or four days the tongue becomes clean,
dark, red, smooth, dry, cracked ; sordes around teeth ;
pulse small and rapid ; hurried or respiration, slow
and labored ; foetid breath ; eruption on the skin ;
hemorrhages, and death, from the fifth to the thirtieth
day.
Treatment.—If any thing can save a patient in this
form of the disease, it is the wet-sheet pack, combining
invigoration and purification. Its effects seem more like
miracles than the natural results of so simple a cause.
But it does nearly all we wish to do. Water drinking,
water injections, and the wet-sheet pack, followed
by the full-bath, will cure cases ninety-nine in a hun
dred, even of the worst forms of this pestilential disor
der.
In all cases of fever, or other disease, accompanied
with great muscular debility, the patient must be han
dled, and not made to exert himself. It may be neces-