Whenever I hear of a new death from whooping cough, I feel the great responsibility that falls upon us physicians. This cough is one of the killers of children: 95 percent of its victims are five years old or younger, and 85 percent of its deaths range in age between two years and a few months, most of them in the first year.
Among the marks of this disease is that it kills all vitality in the patient and weakens all his resistance, so that the child becomes prey to secondary infections such as influenza and chest catarrh. These often lead to the death of a child who could have been saved by preventing or treating the whooping cough.
Today, however, we are able to over
come every possibility of our children dying of this cough. The special whooping-cough vaccine, prepared and developed by Dr. Sauer in Chicago, can give the child immunity against the disease if it is used at the right time and in the right quantity. As for the time, it should be as early as the doctor requires — usually between the third and sixth month, when the child is most susceptible to diseases and his chance of overcoming death is slight.
The preferred method of giving the vaccine is to administer three injections, with a period of four
weeks between one and the next. In modern medicine the whooping-cough vaccine is given together with others, such as the diphtheria injection and the rest, and thus the child is given immunity against all these diseases at one and the same time. Naturally these injections will trouble him for a day or two, and the place of the needle will redden and swell; but these slight reactions are nothing beside the danger and pain that come with the disease itself. The immunity lasts through the dangerous years of childhood; but it is preferable that the child be given another supporting injection at the age of two and a half or three.
And since the children who are given immunity injections are still few in number, you should know something, madam, about the disease itself and about the methods of treating it by which you may save a child dear to you.
The disease is slow at its onset; its first sign is a dry, difficult cough that turns into a bad cough, especially at night. After two days, fever appears along with the cough, and inflammation of the throat, with much water
In the "Journal of the Goncourts" there is an account of a luncheon with "Wilde," in which we read:
— That poet, whose like for tales and anecdotes the eye never opens upon, talked to us of a town in the land of "Texas," in America, and painted its people for us in the most laughable fashion. He said: "Those are people born to the pistol..." Then he claimed he had read on a notice, seen on the walls in certain places of amusement and entertainment: Kindly do not fire at the (piano) player, for the poor fellow is doing his best for his listeners.
And in the book of "Gide" it is told that the author asked Wilde his opinion of the book "Memoirs of the House of the Dead," and Wilde said: "God bless the Russian writers! Their works stand in the highest ranks. And they have been raised to the summit by this mercy which they have poured into them."