Page:Diphtheria - a lecture delivered at the Norfolk and Norwich Hospital (IA b22345656).pdf/11

 twelve hours, the croupy breathing would suddenly cease; the little patient would get up, smile, eat, drink, and amuse himself. The delighted parents would point to him in admiration of your skill. The sonorous breathing, which told so plainly at your last visit that death was there, has disappeared; and, off your guard, you, in the general joy, pronounce him safe. A few hours suffice to turn this joy into mourning; the stridulous breathing returns, to end only with life."

There is yet another, and often quite unforeseen disappointment to the hopes naturally excited in these cases, by the observance that all the severe and characteristic throat-symptoms have disappeared. I allude to the supervention of fatal asthenia—a rapid and sudden exhaustion which nothing would the day before have predicated, but which, on the contrary, nothing but previous experience would lead any one to anticipate. The patient is to all appearance progressing favorably in every respect; the membrane which threatened suffocation has been ejected and ceases to be reproduced; the patient swallows with ease, and takes food with avidity; everything points to a speedy convalescence, when suddenly comes the shipwreck of all hopeful anticipations in an apparently causeless sinking of the vital powers which nothing can arrest. This untoward termination is one that has been occasionally witnessed by all who have seen much of the disease, and is not to be lost sight of until some weeks of uninterrupted convalescence have ensured recovery.

It must not be supposed from the above account that diphtheria is always the fearfully fatal malady here re-