in question not only might have been free from efficient contagion, but might not (or might) have contained a local source of active infective material the week after, or on the very day, the patient left. For though the disease may have been contracted in the house, its source might afterwards have dried up or have been removed from the house. Or, on the other hand, it might not only have been there when the patient left the house, and have remained there in full activity for a week, notwithstanding the means taken to destroy it, but it might easily have survived a month of the "most scientific and thorough disinfection." For the most scientific disinfection known in regard to measles is but a hit-or-miss discharge of chemical agents, aimed at no one knows what, lurking no one knows where—a mummery gone through by the physician in the dark as gravely as though he could see what he is about, and as though he knew that the end proposed was sure to be attained. Indeed nothing comes so near to charlatanism in modern medicine as this professing, or make-believe disinfection-this pretence of doing a specific thing without knowing whether it is to be done by the means employed. For anything that is known the usual forms of disinfection of a house in which measles have prevailed may be altogether superfluous. But enough has been advanced, perhaps, to show that the questions opened up in this action have aspects that did not offer themselves to either side.

No doubt if it comes to a balance of probabilities as to which side was right-that is, on the main point whether the house was void of danger to the incomers in regard of measles-it may be granted at once that substantial justice most likely was done : but that is a very different thing from a determination on scientific grounds of the several issues raised. The judgment probably was sound by accident.

Referring to the attack of the royal and imperial families in the castle of Fredensborg last year, the Times said in a leading article:

"The Princess of Wales is also at Fredensborg, and can therefore scarcely fail to be herself exposed to the infection. Fortunately

measles, although highly contagious, is scarcely dangerous to those who from the beginning are nursed with due care and attention. We may fairly trust that the incident will have no more serious bearing than as an illustration of how little the most exalted rank can protect its possessors from many of the inconveniences which fall upon humbler folk. The departure of the Czar and of the Czarina will probably be postponed for a month, and the Russian ships in attendance to convey and to escort them are under orders to return. An emperor in quarantine is a novel, and surely not an unedifying spectacle."-Times, October 17, 1887.

Perhaps the belief in the extreme contagiousness of measles is, in the present state of knowledge, a fair excuse for resorting to quarantine; but however edifying it may be to reflect upon the case of an emperor condemned to this form of imprisonment, it will hereafter be a reproach to medicine that any traveller in Europe should have been kept in durance on account of this disease.

What, however, might have been a less edifying but more cruel case is the following one taken from the Lancet :—

"German Measles in the Port of Plymouth.

"Owing to the existence of four cases of German measles on board the Peninsular and Oriental steamer Ravenna on her arrival in Plymouth Sound on the 7th inst., the acting Examining Officer of Customs ordered the return of the steam tender, with officials on board, to Melbay until after an inspection by Dr. Fox, the port medical officer. When he visited the ship, he found two boys, sons of a British officer, and two Lascars, suffering from the disease, and it is stated that a difficulty then arose as to dealing with them and the mother of the lads, because there was small-pox on board the port hospital ship. As a matter of fact, there is no power of removal in such cases except under a magistrate's order, and Dr. Fox, having telegraphed to the Local Government Board for instructions, received an answer authorising him to exercise his discretion under the circumstances of the case. In conformity with this view he allowed the vessel and all the passengers to proceed to Gravesend a course which was obviously the right one, for the patients are stated to have been carefully isolated on board, and it is hardly likely that in these circumstances any magistrate would have ordered them into a smallpox hospital."-The Lancet, February 11, 1888.

But for the dash of common sense in the officials concerned in this matter, a barbarous outrage might have been committed under sanction of the law. If these British lads and Lascars had been incarcerated on board the port hospital ship, and had taken small-pox and died, there would have been murder de facto, though not de jure; and it is high time that such legal atrocities should not be left to the discretion of anybody to perpetrate. Why persons should be imprisoned at all for the trivial offence of being found with German measles on board ship at a port of a country in which the complaint is endemic, is not very clear; but letting that pass, we may glance for a moment at the etiological side of this limited outbreak in the Ravenna.

Assuming that the disease in this instance was easily to be discriminated from its congener measles, and that the diagnosis therefore was correct, two important and interesting questions arise-How did this outbreak of rötheln originate? and why was it confined to the two boys and the two Lascars? Without knowing the circumstances attendant on this occurrence, it would be idle to attempt to answer these questions; but I would throw out the suggestion that the inquirer who should investigate one or two such sharply defined groups of rötheln, or of measles, as the one on board this ship, might learn more of the causation of these diseases than by studying larger epidemics for years, especially with the clue to be had from Dr. Salisbury's views.

In this instance, for example, he would have had an admirable opportunity of ascertaining the conditions under which the infections occurred, and of bringing out the conditions by which the exemptions were insured in this closely-packed community on board the steamer. If he could have gone into the investigation philosophically, he would have concluded, perhaps, that the theory of contagion is insufficient to reconcile the infections with the exemptions; that the four persons attacked in the Ravenna were infected by air-contamination from some local source in the vessel; and that none others on board but these four were exposed to the contaminated air sufficiently long to

have become efficiently infected. He would first have looked to the sleeping berths as the place of contamination, and to the straw-bedding as its source. If foiled there for a time, however, the curious limitation of the complaint to the two boys and the two Lascars, and the singular fact that the disease should have turned out to be rötheln, or imperfect measles, must soon have guided him to the spot, or spots, where the mildewed straw was. For it is to be inferred that the straw was not wheaten straw, or that, if it was wheaten straw, there was from some cause an arrest of mildew growth, or a preclusion of one of the forms usually present in air contaminated by mildewed wheaten straw.

Possibly the morbilloid affection of these boys and Lascars may have been the result of their simultaneous exposure to an inordinate concentration of the straw mildews within a limited volume of air away from their berths. In addition to the cases in which similar results from such exposure have been observed in England, America, and Australia, before cited, I may mention another case which occurred in this Colony of Victoria some eighteen years ago. Several children playing about in a barn while some musty oaten hay was passing through a chaff-cutter, were attacked the same day with a complaint scarcely to be distinguished from typical measles. So these boys may have been down in the hold of the vessel while the Lascars were packing or unpacking or otherwise disturbing packages in which there was mildewed straw, and all may have been infected together in that way. And this mode of infection might have caused the morbilloid affection to differ in some respects from frank or normal measles, and might have led to its having been diagnosed as the German variety.

Or again it may be that the common cause of the infection was to have been found in the closets of the ship-though it is highly improbable, for many reasons which will suggest themselves. Enough has been said to indicate a new line of investigation.

S

CHAPTER XXIV.

The practice of exposing children wilfully to contagion―Reprehensible custom, but was formerly sanctioned-Dr. Ollivier's reasons against the practice excellent-His views of the contagiousness of the catarrhal secretions, however, are not borne out by the factsIsolation of patients ineffectual to stop the spread of measles, and, theoretically, it should not-What is the probable sum of the disease caused by parents wilfully exposing their children to the hypothetical contagium?—The chances of their infection by the common cause— Inferences to be drawn from the practice of "bundling" children.

THE old question now and again crops up whether, all things considered, it is not better that children should have their measles early and be done with them, than that they should escape infection and so advance into adolescence and manhood unprotected by an attack.

It is a popular notion, particularly among agricultural labourers, mill hands and mechanics, and among a proportion of every class in the British community-the proportion varying greatly in different districts-that the sooner children get the measles the better. As the occurrence of the disease is regarded as the almost inevitable fate sooner or later of every one, it is held to be a fortunate thing to take it when young, if only it is not fatal, or does not leave very serious ailments behind. For this reason many parents are not solicitous about keeping their children out of the way of infection. They may not go to the extreme length of exposing them to the contagion deliberately, but they take no active steps to prevent them from going within what is supposed to be the sphere of its influence. They are simply passive in the matter and let their