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slowly perishes by tabes or scrofula. It is manifest,
too, that the young infant is very susceptible
of an attack of small-pox; and this indicates the
necessity for early vaccination. As to the greater
mortality from scarlet-fever at the ages of from 2
to 5, it is evident that it arises from the circumstance
that children are then first associated at play
and in school, and are thus unusually exposed to
infection.
Lastly, the statistics show us that all the exanthematous
diseases are most virulent in the haunts of
the very poorest classes, where there is not merely
a total disregard of the commonest decencies of life,
but where the necessitous over-crowding of members
of the same family encourages the spread of disease
by intensifying the virus, by bringing the healthy
into contact with the sick, and by so lowering the
vital powers as to render the system very susceptible
of attack, and less able to endure the effects of
it. Nor is it alone in the manifestations of zymotic
disease that this unwholesome state of things exhibits
itself. The mephitic atmosphere of the
dirty and over-crowded dwellings of the poor acts
slowly on the nutritive functions of the body, and
engenders a strumous condition, which ere long
shows itself in scrofula, tabes—mesenterica, and
hydrocephalus, or in the early symptoms of pulmonary
consumption. All this is seen in the