lescent patient going to the sea-side. We easily picture him going to the terminus in a London cab, travelling in a public railway-carriage, then travelling in another public conveyance, and finally deposited in a public lodging-house. Early convalescence is often a most dangerous period in the disorder, when minute particles from the skin-invisible, impalpable—take wings, and become elements of danger, multiplying seeds of disease and death. It is safer to travel in a carriage with parcels of nitro-glycerine than with such a patient. If our national sanitary arrangements were in a satisfactory state, such a case would be certified from the London to the local physician, and, both on road and rail, special carriages would be provided, or the ordinary carriages be at once disinfected. Or if, as is usual in this country, such things must be left in private hands, there is a proper treatment which would entirely, or almost entirely, annihilate the danger of contagion. Many of our readers will recollect the piteous case set forth some time back by Dr. Bradley, the present head of University College, when he was head master of Marlborough College. He wanted to know, in the columns of the Times, and various afflicted parents made the same inquiry, when it would be safe for a boy recovering from scarlet fever to return to his home. Scarlatina is almost the one terrible rock ahead which public and private schools have to fear. Many of us know very sad stories of the premature deaths of the young, and the losses and even ruin of school-masters through this terrible visitation. It is not every school which has the vitality of Marlborough College to withstand such trials. In answer to these appeals, the whole theory and practice of disinfection were clearly set forth by competent medical authority. Such obvious methods were suggested as the isolating the patient, the anointing him from head to foot with camphorated olive-oil, the destruction or most thorough cleansing of all things infected, the use of entirely untainted clothes; and then we are assured that patients might be restored to society after a very limited quarantine. The natural apprehension would be that these simple means might not prove sufficient; but the real fact is, that it is extremely difficult to make people resort even to such simple means as these. Not one hundredth part is found of the energy in preventing disease that is employed in attempting to work its cure. What is wanted is a wider teaching of the elementary principles of such matters, and a greater degree of courage and conscience in applying them.
The fact is, that the prevention of diseases should be more regarded than it is, as a true end and scope of medical science. It is to the credit of medical men that they are more and more devoting their best energies in this direction. The skill of medical diagnosis has been carried to the utmost, but not with the result of any corresponding subjugation of disease. Indeed, it is a humiliating fact that, in those chest-cases where medical science has made the most marvellous dis-
