Page:Transactions of the Provincial Medical and Surgical Association, volume 4.djvu/271

 Rh the same variation as to prevalence, both in place and time; it being occasionally absent from the practice of different practitioners, in different parts of the district, for several years at a time. The uniform testimony of the older practitioners was in favour of its much greater prevalence and severity in former years. Their recent experience was only conversant with the simple scarlatina with slight affection of the throat; while in their early practice the disease in a putrid form, as they describe it, the true cynanche maligna, was rife and very fatal. The same fact is illustrated by the register of the deaths in the two parishes already referred to. In St. Paul's, which does not extend further back than the year 1795, we have only one death from "throat disorder" while in that of St. Hilary, which comprehends the time from 1777 to 1805, we have 11 from the same cause, being one in 79 of the whole mortality. I think it probable, however, that in the register of the former parish, some of the cases included under the general name of Mortification, were in reality the putrid sore throat, a disease which was early signalised as of fatal prevalence in Cornwall.

In the 46th vol. of the Philosophical Transactions, for the year 1750, there is a very interesting account of a fatal epidemic of this kind at Liskeard, (twenty miles to the eastward of the hundred of Penwith) given by Dr. John Starr, under the name of Morbus strangulatorius. It appears to have been unaccompanied with any cutaneous eruption, and to have proved fatal in general, by the extension of the inflammatory affection of the fauces into the trachea, producing the peculiar form of secondary croup,