LOCK-JAW

or Tetanus, is an infectious disease in which spasm of certain muscles is the chief symptom and which is caused by 2 bacillus or germ, that lives in garden mould and manure, and gains entrance as a rule through a scratch in the skin. The old belicf that a cut on the thumb causes; lock-jaw is simply an expre ion of the fact that wounds of the hands, from their exposed position, pide 3 to become infected with dirt. Gardeners, stable and the: bare-footed — of the poor Bred es tore attacked than others. © poison produ tho tetanus has be on isolated and mone to be abou one per a pe, fifty times os poisonous as strychnine. The incubation period is le than a week in the worst cases, but longer, than this in the milder ones. The symptoms are at first. difficulty in biting, with stiffne of the neck, and later the abdominal wall becomes hard and board like. Any: irritation, e.g. a sudden noise, brings on a most painful 4 epasm of the whole body, in which the breathing may be ) arrested. The temperature rises in the worst cases. The d treatment consists in cauterizing the wound, putting the? patient to bed in a quiet, dimly-lighted room, injecting a tetanus antitoxin, or failing this giving chloral and bromide,: of cach ten jedan three hours, and feeding the patient = through the nose, or by the bowel, if it cannot be done 7 through the mouth. The Greeks tang that such cases 1 as survived four days recovered, and Profe or Osler holds 4 this to be true at tho present time. The longer the incuba f, 4 [s. 383]