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1910] 118
'' and success, there was one shadow that ever fell black and sinister across
" his tiny horoscope. Certain risks there were which were almost inevitable"
initiation ceremonies into life, mild expiations to be paid to the gods of
" the modern underworld, the diseases of infancy and childhood. Most of
" these could be passed over with little more than a temporary wrinkle to
" break her smile. They were so trivial, so comparatively harmless: measles,
" a mere reddening of the eyelids and peppering of the throat, with a head"
ache and purplish rash, dangerous only if neglected ; chicken pox, a child's-play
" at disease; scarlatina, a little more serious, but still with the chances of
" twenty to one in favour of recovery; diphtheria, ah! that drove the smile
" from her face and the blood from her lips. Not quite so common, not so
" inevitable as a prospect, but, as a possibility, full of terror, once its poison
" had passed the gates of the body fortress. The fight between the Angel
" of Life and the Angel of Death was waged on almost equal terms, with
" none daring to say which would be the victor, and none able to lift a hand
" with any certainty to aid.
" Nor was the doctor in much happier plight. Even when the life at
"stake was not one of his own loved ones—though from the deadly contagious"
ness of the disease it sadly often was (I have known more doctors made
" childless by diphtheria than by any other disease except tuberculosis)—
" he faced his cases by the hundred instead of by twos and threes. The
" feeling of helplessness, the sense of foreboding, with which we faced every
"case was something appalling. Few of us who have been in practice twenty
" years or more, or even fifteen, will ever forget the shock of dismay which
" ran through us whenever a case to which we had been summoned revealed
" itself to be diphtheria. Of course, there was a fighting chance, and we
" made the most of it; for in the milder epidemics only ten to twenty
" per cent. of the patients died, and even in the severest a third of them
" recovered. But what ' turned our liver to water,' as the graphic Oriental
" phrase has it, was the knowledge which, like Banquo's ghost, would not down,
" that while many cases would recover of themselves, and in many border-line
" ones our skill would turn the balance in favour of recovery, yet if the
" disease happened to take a certain sadly familiar, virulent form we could
" do little more to stay its fatal course than we could stop an avalanche, and
" we never knew when a particular epidemic or a particular case would take
" that turn. 'Black' diphtheria was as deadly as the Black Death of the
" middle ages."