Our Changing Complaints

Ladies' Mirror, Volume 5, Issue 1, 1 July 1926, Page 41

Our Changing Complaints

"T7*verything changes. . . Even iv our epidemics, the very diseases, are changing!'' an eminent doctor has said. It is true. "The ills that flesh is heir to" change in character ; some that are serious and deadly in one generation become mild and unimportant in the next. Smallpox was once a shocking and devastating thing that left its trail of blighted and dead. There were periods in our history when it raged as a plague, and half the people were pock-marked, many died every year, and many were blinded. Then vaccination robbed it of its terrors. In its "black," or confluent, form it is still the ghastliest of afflictions, though to-day it is mostly a trivial affair. Indeed, a headache and a mere pimple, which is all it may present, may easily be overlooked. Diphtheria has undergone much change, and is by no means so serious as the thing of twenty years ago. Anti-toxin has snatched away its armaments, and made it amenable to some extent. Scarlet-fever, too, that was growing sadly deadly to children a few years back is milder. Dangerous JWeasles "CLEEPY sickness" that was unknown, at any rate, as such,

a few years ago, and that developed a deadly meningitic character—is now much less harmful in some of its phases, though in others it is still sufficiently nasty and uncannily unsettling afterwards. Measles, that triviality of childhood of a generation or two back, has changed for the worse, and is causing some concern to the pathologists, and those whose business it is to study the incidence of epidemic disease. It is not so many years ago that the writer heard a consultant say, "Ordinary measles is nothing, and the German form is negligible!" The oracle would hesitate to make such a pronouncement today, for both complaints ' need watching and care now in view of their sequelae. Rheumatic troubles, also, especially in the chronic forms, have not improved their characters, and are becoming so prevalent as to threaten to cripple the nation unless research clears up certain obscure patches; for though some wonderful things have been done with inoculation with autogenous vaccines of special streptococci, one cannot go about injecting the populace wholesale, andit doesn't always act. These are. but a few of our troubles which have changed.