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cases than in any others. I have repeatedly been told, that when the small-pox appears confluent among the Africans, it is a common practice, for mothers to rub their children all over with pepper, and plunge them immediately afterwards into a spring of cold water. This, they fay, destroys a great part of the pock, and disposes the remainder to a kindly suppuration. From the success that has attended the use of the cold bath in putrid fevers in some parts[1] of Europe, mentioned in a former lecture, I am disposed to believe in the efficacy of the African remedy.
The fever generally lasts three days, and the eruption continues for a similar length of time, counting the last day of the fever as the first day of the eruption. But this remark is liable to many exceptions. We sometimes observe the eruption to begin on the first, and often on the second day of the fever; and we sometimes meet with cases in which a second eruption comes on after the fever has abated for several days, and the first eruption considerably advanced in its progress towards a com-
- ↑ In a dissertation entitled "Epidemia verna quæ Wratislaviam, Anno 1737 afflixit," published in the appendix to the Acta Nat. Curios. Vol. X. it appears, that washing the body all over with cold water in putrid fevers, attended with great debility, was attended with success at Breslaw in Silesia. The practice has since been adopted, we are told, by several of the neighbouring countries. Cullen’s first lines of the practice of physic.
