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Tabular view of the Patients Treated at the Homœopathic Hospital of the Sisters of Charity at Gumpendorf, from January 1835 to January 1855.

REMARKS ON HOOPING COUGH.

BY DR. BLACK.

According to the London bills of mortality hooping cough is a very frequent cause of death; only six diseases produce a greater mortality, viz., phthisis, pneumonia, bronchitis, typhus, convulsions. This circumstance, coupled with the frequency of the disease, and the injurious effects it sometimes entails, suggests the importance of an examination, first, as to whether improvement in the medical art is likely to diminish the duration, the intensity, and the mortality; secondly, what assistance homœopathy brings to effect this desirable consummation.

The first question may be limited to the ordinary modes of healing.

Few diseases have afforded more scope than hooping cough for theories as to its nature, and seat, but comparing later with earlier writers, there is now much less leaning to conjectural pathology as a basis of treatment. The error is still too prevålent of regarding the nature of the disease as the guide to treatment, and however pleasing such a plan may be to the mental powers, a system of pathological therapeutics based on imaginary and apparent explanations of their internal causes, must be ever changing and unsteady. It is adherence to this plan which has led and still leads to much of the mortality arising from hooping cough; this will be apparent in the following extracts, which are taken from an admirable clinical lecture lately delivered by Dr. Todd,* and from the last edition of the well known work of Barthez and Rilliet.+

Dr. Todd writes: "I am sure that the more hooping cough is treated as a spasmodic, rather than an inflammatory affection, the greater will be the success of our practice, and the less the mortality from that disease."

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"That plan, [the antiphlogistic] indeed has had a fair trial; and if it had any real power over the disease, we should have, long ere this, accumulated abundant evidence to prove its supe*Medical Times and Gazette, March 4, 1854.

Traité clinique et pratique des Maladies des Enfants. Tom. ii. Art. Coqueluche. 1854.

riority. The tendency of all the usual antiphlogistic measures is to weaken the nutrition of the lungs and the nervous system, and to impoverish the blood; to reduce the quantity of its colouring matter, to favour the accession of convulsions, and, by the watery parts of the blood filtering through the walls of the blood-vessels, to promote the tendency to hydrocephalus.” -p. 206.

But you must bear in mind, that such remedies should be used with caution, especially opiates, which in infancy and childhood are at all times to be given with great care, and more particularly if the lungs have become congested. The drugs which I would recommend you to avoid are those which have a depressing and lowering tendency, such as Tartar emetic and Ipecacuanha. Many children, I am quite satisfied, while suffering from hooping cough, have died from the too free and slovenly exhibition of these emetics."—(p. 206.)

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Assuming hooping cough to be a disease depending on the presence of a morbid poison in the blood, [why the blood?] (which is the most reasonable view of its pathology,) to cure the affection perfectly, we ought to find an antidote for the poison, which produces it. If we could find some material which, when introduced into the system, after it had received the poison, would neutralise that poison, then we should have the same power over this malady, as we now possess over intermittent fever, which, as you know, is also a paroxysmal disease, depending on the presence of some morbid poison in the system, and for which an antidote has been found in Bark. But since, unfortunately, no antidote for hooping cough has as yet been discovered, it should not be our practice to look on in silence, and let the patient cough it out; but our aim should be to find the means of guarding him against the bad consequences of the cough, and to protect him from all those complications to which I referred in the commencement of the lecture."

The treatment recommended by Dr. Todd in uncomplicated hooping cough may justly be called expectant, it is one rather of prevention than of cure. He believes, that "in a large number of cases, one can get on very well without having