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 the constitutional powers, and thus rendering them less able to resist toxic agents of any kind. The poor children who are doomed night after night to breathe the fetid atmosphere of their miserable dormitories, six or eight, perhaps, consuming the air which could at most only supply healthy respiration to two or three, cannot be expected to exhibit such a standard of vitality as shall enable them to rebut the attacks of the unseen pestilence. Let them, in addition to this, be surrounded by the poisonous exhalations of sewers and dungheaps, and have their acquaintance with animal food limited to a small hebdomadal vision of a piece of pork, and you have a state of things the most favorable for giving the malignant impress to diphtheria, if it appears amongst them, as well as to any other disease. Fresh air, especially in the sleeping apartments, must be studiously enjoined, all sources of foul gaseous emanations must be removed, and a full animal diet afforded, conjoined with a reasonable amount of stimulus. Nor is it enough, when the disease has once appeared in a village, to confine these precautions to the persons and houses of the afflicted. Those still intact should be fortified by a more liberal diet, and submitted to the same sanitary precautions, if we would seriously apply ourselves to the arrest of the disease.

When a child is attacked by diphtheria, immediate seclusion from the rest of the family is essential, and those who are of necessity brought into contact with it should take every precaution not to inhale the breath too closely, and especially to avoid the contact of the fetid diphtheritic secretions with the mucous membranes. Sufficient care in this respect is, I believe, not always