Page:Blood examination.djvu/24

12 with some impairment of his mental faculties. In children the cerebral type is especially severe, and the hyperpyrexia makes it still easier to fall into the mistaken diagnosis of siriasis.

Or again, to diagnose as malaria and to treat trypanosomiasis with quinine, when atoxyl seems to be the only drug which has a really valuable influence upon the disease, is almost as bad as leaving the patient unattended to die; or to bathe a liver abscess with quinine, after diagnosing the patient's symptoms as those of malaria, is either to allow him to die under the wrong diagnosis and treatment or, should the correct diagnosis be arrived at later, to bring him to operation in a very unsatisfactory condition.

A patient coming with the history of a sudden onset of hæmorrhage from the bowel and stomach may completely put one off one's guard, and acute dysentery may be the diagnosis made rather too casually, where malaria parasites might be found swarming in the blood.

Dysentery of the amœbic type showed an average leucocytosis of 10,600 in Futcher's 38 cases; if complicated with abscess, as in 15 cases, the average was 18,350. Schlayer, in