Page:Transactions of the Provincial Medical and Surgical Association, volume 1.djvu/113

 It was the case of a child, æt. 18 months, that was first attacked with cerebral symptoms, after the decline of the morbillous eruption; the cough was troublesome, and the fever considerable. He had occasional screaming and vomiting, and was afterwards comatose, with dilated pupils, &c. Here the disease of the brain, and effusion into the ventricles, which appeared on dissection, were the immediate cause of death, and there were incipient tubercles on the pia mater, and the lungs were found studded with tubercles in their nascent state.

Neither can it be denied, that though hydrocephalus does not spare the most healthy children, yet it is more frequent in those of a scrofulous diathesis. Percival states that, out of twenty-two cases, eleven were decidedly, and four apparently, scrofulous; and Cheyne records two instances, where five out of one family, and ten from another, fell victims to this disease. In a family residing in this neighbourhood, where, out of fourteen children, eight have died; it appears that, of these eight deaths, three were cases of hydrocephalus, two of disease of the mesenteric glands, and two of phthisis pulmonalis. In other families we find the osseous fabric the seat of strumous disorganization, and one child will have a rickety affection, or a deformity of the chest, such as in after life may evoke some phthisical tendency, another a caries of the bones, and a third spinal distortion.

In a young girl whom I lately saw, along with Mr. Sargent, of this town, and who had, from her birth, exhibited unequivocal indications of a strumous diathesis, and who, for many months past, was suffering