2. The skin is best acted on by one variety or other of bath : the warm bath for children, or cold sponge, the cold pack or bath for adults. But if medicine is insisted on, or for one reason or another is more easily used than the bath, the following mixture may be given :— Half a tea-spoonful to children, a dessert spoonful to adults in a table-spoonful of water may be repeated every two hours till the effect is obtained.
3. To stimulate the kidneys pure water is best, and it may be given in wine-glassful doses, flavoured with a few drops of lemon, every hour till the urine is increased, clearer and less highly coloured. If some medicine is deemed necessary, the sweet spirit of nitre (spirit of nitrous ether) is the best, 5 to 10 drops for a child, 30 drops for an adult, and it would be well to give it added to the above mixture. If the two were made up together it would be thus:— Half a tea-spoonful to a child, a dessert-spoon ful to an adult, given in water and repeated till the effect is produced.
4. To reduce fever, as has been said, one form or other of bath is best. The medicine most likely to succeed is antipyrin. It also is best given in repeated small doses at short intervals till the effect is produced, and it is well to combine it with the ammonia mixture, but the ether must be left out, as it forms a bad combination with antipyrin. The mixture would then be :— Half a tea-spoonful to a child, a dessert-spoon ful to an adult, given in any desired quantity of water every two hours till the temperature is down to 100°.
Any intelligent attendant, who can watch the temperature by means of the thermometer, will soon discover how frequently the mixture must be given to keep the fever within reason able bounds. It is not a good way to let the
fever have its swing till it gets alarmingly high. But as soon as it is apparent that something must be done to keep it within bounds, then it is the business of the nurse to set herself to find, not how she and the fever may play battledore and shuttlecock, but to discover how much is needful of cold sponging, or cold pack, or cold bath to keep the temperature from going above 102°. If these means are not available, and she can get the medicine, then she sets her self to repeat the dose till the temperature is down to as has been said, and after that to find how much, and given how often, is just sufficient, and no more, to keep the temperature front rushing above 102°.
5. Restlessness, delirium, and sleeplessness are not the result of the high temperature alone ; they are partly the result of the high temperature, but in part directly due to the poisons circulating in the blood and acting on the nervous system. Nevertheless the height of the temperature also, as a rule, marks the greatest degree of these symptoms also, and the reduction .of the temperature will to some de gree allay them. The bath is here again to be preferred, but where medicine is desired the ammonia and antipyrin mixture is the best, just as it is for the fever. But where restless ness and delirium are specially marked and troublesome, a little bromide of potassium may be added to the mixture, which then becomes— Half a tea-spoonful as before to a child, a dessert spoonful to an adult, given in any desired quan tity of water, and repeated every two hours till the desired effect is obtained.'