Page:Transactions of the Provincial Medical and Surgical Association, volume 1.djvu/109

 of a child, I find it recorded, that both lungs were completely studded with tubercles. There was a cavern in the right lung filled with tuberculous matter, that drained into it from broken down tubercles. Tubercles were also found in the liver, spleen, and mesentery.

This disease, it is well known, more commonly arises in children of a scrofulous habit, from the age of a few months to that of ten or twelve years. It is only in the earlier stages that its progress seems capable of being arrested; but, even in these cases, such is the treacherous nature of the disease, that its reappearance is often ushered in under a different form. Where the predisposition to scrofula is inherited by children from their parents, we find many anomalous symptoms arising out of slight attacks of indisposition, and diseases usually curable in a short time by ordinary means, acquire additional complexity and danger. Wherever it mingles with any accidental or local complaint, it makes all the symptoms worse, and there is no structure nor organ of the body which is not obnoxious to its ravages. It is not merely in the tumid abdomen and the enlarged joint, but in the lungs, heart, liver, kidneys and intestines, in the eyes and brain, that its destructive effects unfold themselves. We are told by Dr. Davis, (Annals of the Universal Dispensary) that the principal source of mortality among the children of the lower classes in the Metropolis, is the prevalence of pulmonary affections, in many of whom were discovered, on dissection, unequivocal indications of incipient scrofula. The same is stated also to be the case at Paris. It appears that at the Hotel des Enfans