28 DECEMBER 1889, Page 2

In Paris the influenza has been very severe, and several

physicians have reported on it. Dr. G. See says that it very seldom attacks patients who are suffering from tubercular disease of the lungs, but is most serious with those whose bronchial tubes or hearts are enfeebled by previous disease. Others of the doctors consider that it is a disease connected with malaria and typhoid-fever, and that this connection shows itself in the enlargement of the spleen, a symptom characteristic of those diseases, and also observed in con- nection with the present epidemic. The worst feature about the present attack is the tendency to relapse, and the not infrequent tendency to inflammation of the lungs which accompanies these relapses. In the case of most epidemics, one attack appears to exempt from liability to another ; but in the case of this epidemic it is not so, the sufferers from one attack being apparently much more liable to another than those who have not had any attack at all. Dr. Oscar Jennings regards the epidemic as not properly belonging to the influenza type at all. He calls it " a species of bastard rheumatism," which attacks all the limbs and becomes dangerous when it reaches the lungs, when it has a tendency to produce pulmonary paralysis. It usually prefers, he thinks, the left lung to the right. He treats it with small and frequent doses of quinine and antipyrine.