Page:A Treatise upon the Small-Pox.pdf/50

22 ripen, swell, and want room to spread themselves, then their Nature is more favourable, and the Danger less; and therefore it is from Inadvertence and Want of Attention, that those Physicians, who have wrote the History of the Small-Pox, have not taken Notice of this middle Sort as a different Kind from the other two, having the same Grounds and Reasons for doing so, as they have to make a Division between the Distinct and Confluent Species.

As a simple continued Fever consists in the irregular Disposition, and shattered Frame of the Blood, while the sulphurous Particles are exalted to an excessive Power, and an unnatural Dominion over the rest, and so have ruffled and disordered the Mass, which however suffers not any Degree of Putrefaction, that is, any minute Division of its Parts, that destroy their Coherence with each other, and their Union with the whole; so in the distinct Kind of the Small-Pox the Blood is in the like irregular State, but yet free from the Corruption before described: But in the middle Sort, which is partly distinct and partly flowing together, there is a considerable Degree of the Putrefaction which I have mentioned before, and have more fully explained in my Discourse of the Plague and malignant Fevers; yet it must be acknowledged, that sometimes, though very rarely, it happens, as I have seen, that great Putrefaction accompanies even the distinct Sort, which shews it self