WHOOPING-COUGH, or PERTYSSIS. An infectious and sometimes epidemic disease, most ly attacking children, especially in the spring and autumn. Its earliest symptoms, which usu ally appear five or six days after exposure to in fection, are those of a common cold. as hoarse ness, a watery discharge from time eyes and nose, oppression of the chest, a short,_ dry cough. and more or less feverishness. This stage, which is called the catarrhal, lasts a week or ten days, when the fever remits, and the cough begins to be followed by the peculiar whooplvhich characterizes the disease, and which is caused by the inspira tion of air through the contracted cleft of the glottis. (See LARYNX.) The disorder may now he regarded as fully developed, and consists of paroxysms of severe coughing, which usually terminate in the expectoration of glairy mucus, or in vomiting. During the fit of coughing the face becomes red or livid, the eyes project, and the child seizes some person or object for sup port. These paroxysms occur at uncertain inter vals, but usually about every two hours, and be tween them the child returns to play, takes food with good appetite, and exhibits little or no sign of illness. The disease reaches its height at about the end of the fourth week, after which the paroxysms diminish in frequency, and the patient shows signs of improvement. The second
stage may last from two to eight weeks, and is succeeded by what may be termed the convales cent stage, the duration of which is very variable.
Pathology has failed to throw any direct light upon its special seat. The proportion of deaths to recoveries in cases of whooping-cough has not been satisfactorily determined, but when there is a severe epidemic the mortality due to this disease is often very great; the deaths, how ever, in the majority of cases, occur among the poorer classes. This mortality is, in reality, due rather to the bronchitis and pneumonia which are frequent complications of whooping-cough than to the disease itself.
The diet should consist of milk and unstinsu hating farinaceous matters. The bowels should be kept moderately open. If the weather is cold, the child should be kept in the house with the temperature of the room about 60°. Slight counter-irritants may also be applied to the sur face of the chest. Nothing else is so serviceable in the last or convalescent stage as sea air. The medicinal treatment calls for the services of a physician.