In consideration of the prevalence and mortality rate of typhoid, as ordinarily treated, I desire to present a method of management in this infection which promises to reduce the mortality to a large extent.
The most constant objective symptom of infection is fever, and it has been considered the physician's duty to combat it at all hazards. The use of the coal-tar antipyretics, however, was followed by an increased mortality rate, while the Brand method, founded on the idea that fever should be lessened, if possible, does not, I believe, materially lower the mortality rate. A consideration of the complex of symptoms which we call fever leads me to believe the rise of temperature in fever to be, as Bunge says, "one of the processes of self-protection and regulation of which we have so many examples in the body." On the assumption that fever is a physiologic effort at self-defense,