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XLVI] avoided. A punkah at night is a great comfort. Many things have been recommended as preventives; for example, rubbing the body over after the bath with the juice of a lemon, Jeyes' fluid or bran in the bath, etc. Every bath-room in the tropics should be provided with some mildly astringent and antiseptic dusting powder. A very good one consists of equal parts of boric acid, oxide of zinc, and starch. This should be freely applied, after careful drying of the skin, particularly to the axillæ, crutch, under the mammæ in women, and between the folds of skin in fat children and adults. A simple precaution of this sort saves much suffering both from prickly heat and epiphytic skin disease. Durham recommends painting the patches with weak iodine or, better, rubbing in solution of corrosive sublimate, 1 in 500 to 1 in 1,000: this he found very efficacious, curing the disease with certainty after one or two applications. He suggests the use of some form of obstetric soap as being less liable to lead, through inadvertence, to accidental poisoning.

Castellani advises the frequent application of a salicylic acid (51) and spirit (^viii) lotion. Pearse strongly recommends the inunction of a mixture of almond oil and lanolin in the proportion of 8 to 1, and scented according to fancy. St. George Gray finds thin flannel a better wear than cotton or linen as a preventive of prickly heat. Sometimes the following powder, gently rubbed in for five or ten minutes with a damp sponge, cures bad patches of prickly heat: Sublimed sulphur, 80 parts; magnesia, 15 parts; oxide of zinc, 5 parts. Lotions of calamine, with or without hydrocyanic acid, or of carbolic acid, relieve the itching temporarily.

Definition.— A rapidly spreading but, as a rule, after a time, spontaneously arrested gangrene of the skin and subjacent tissues, resulting in the formation