The majority of the above-named symptoms will almost invariably indicate the presence of a febrile state.
Any child kept at home away from school for a week or more by its parents should, before returning to its school, bring a certificate of health, signed by a duly qualified medical practitioner.
Infectious Febrile Diseases.—Small-pox is rarely found in those schools where vaccination is enforced, as the majority of vaccinated children have not yet lost the protective influence of primary vaccination. Whenever possible, the teacher should have all the children over ten years revaccinated, especially in times of epidemic small-pox. The popular assertion, that, during epidemics of small-pox, revaccination tends further to develop small-pox, is absolutely false.
Small-pox sets in with fever, vomiting, and pains in the loins. After not less than two days, but most frequently on the third day of the illness, there appears—commencing on the face—an eruption of raised spots, more or less numerous, which pass later into pimples or pustules, having a depressed or navel-like center. These spots terminate in scabs, which should have completely disappeared before the child is allowed to return to school. Before readmission to the school the child should have had two or three baths.
Chicken-pox is a mild disease, occasionally preceded by fever. It is characterized by successive crops of blebs, preceded by red-colored spots, each new crop being apt to appear toward evening, and is generally accompanied with some accession of slight fever. Chicken-pox is characterized by pea-sized blebs, or blisters, filled with a transparent watery liquid, which soon becomes thick, muddy, or bloody, and terminates with scabs. Where the spots on the body are neither numerous nor well marked, the eruption is invariably observed among the hair of the head.
Measles is ushered in with general indisposition, fever, sneezing, weeping, and red eyes, loud noisy cough; occasionally there may be bleeding from the nose and passing diarrhœa. After three or four days' illness, sometimes sooner, an eruption shows itself, first on the chin and face in small, irregular rose-red spots, slightly elevated, which soon spread over the surface of the body, leaving more or less pale, irregular patches of skin unattacked. The complaint is highly contagious. Children with measles, when kept at home, and not exposed to the chance of catching cold, generally do well.
Scarlet fever commences with extreme general indisposition, high fever, a dry, burning skin, pains about the throat, and vomiting. Generally toward the end of the first day's illness, sometimes even at the very outset, a child, but a few minutes before in apparent good health, presents itself with a raspberry-red blush or rash, which may either cover the body completely or else appear here and there in patches. The face, the interior of the thighs, the groins, and the neighborhood of the joints are favored situations for the rash. At first glance the
