Page:Tropical Diseases.djvu/592

548 days or weeks the diarrhœa may subside. In other instances it persists, in defiance of treatment, until the return of the patient to the warm plains, when it at once spontaneously subsides. Crombie instanced a case in which the patient was regularly attacked with hill diarrhœa whenever he visited Simla— twelve occasions— recovery invariably taking place on his return to the plains. If the looseness is both considerable and protracted, there necessarily ensue debility, wasting, and anæmia, and the disease may lapse into confirmed sprue— an affection having, apparently, close affinities with hill diarrhœa.

Treatment.— The treatment recommended by Crombie, and endorsed by other medical men of experience in India, consists in a pure milk diet, rest, warm clothing, a teaspoonful of liquor hydrargyri perchloridi in water about fifteen minutes after food, and 12 gr. of pepsin, or a corresponding quantity of lactopeptin or ingluvin, two hours later. If, in spite of treatment, the disease persists, the patient must return to the low country.