Page:Skin Diseases of Children.djvu/29



are few if any cutaneous affections so ineffectually and unsuccessfully treated by the physician in general practice as are ringworm and favus. The family physician who assumes to understand and undertakes to treat (as every family physician should do) the common affections of the skin is often guilty of serious malpractice in the management of these parasitic affections. The diagnosis is generally made without difficulty, although mistakes will sometimes occur in the best-regulated practice. But, granting that the diagnosis is speedily and correctly made, the treatment commonly employed is so poorly adapted to the requirements of the case and so imperfectly carried on, that many incipient cases, which ought to be cured by a few weeks of vigorous treatment, are allowed to persist for months or years, it may be, and to become so chronic and intractable that even the most skilful treatment must then require a long period of time and much patience to effect a cure. Nor is this the only baneful effect of this feebleness of therapeutic efforts. Other children in the family, the school, or the vicinage are permitted to contract the disease, while the physician treating the original case remains blissfully ignorant of the ever-increasing debt of suffering which is his just due. Therapeutic incompetence may appear less criminal than wilful neglect, but the results are equally unfortunate, and in the treatment of these common parasitic affections the physician ought not to be guilty of either charge.

There are three common affections of the skin due to the presence of a vegetable parasite—viz., favus, trichophytosis (ringworm), and chromophytosis (tinea versicolor). As the latter is rarely if ever met with in childhood, it may be left out of consideration at present; and since the remaining two, though distinct in origin and clinical features, are allied in nature and call for similar methods of treatment, it will be convenient to consider them together.