In reference to the probable result of the disease, when it occurs in
its mild and simple form in a healthy child, the termination is usually
favourable; but it may at first assume this form, and afterwards become
complicated, and consequently more or less dangerous, owing to
injudicious management, or to various influences over which the mother
has no control.
It generally appears as an epidemic, and at those seasons when
catarrhal complaints are most prevalent, and affects many or several at
the same time. Isolated cases, however, frequently occur, which seem to
prove the disease to be infectious. Some persons deny that it is so.
Mothers and nurses, however, who have not had the disease, will often
contract it from the child under such circumstances, and thus it will
be quickly propagated through the family. The nursing mother will
occasionally take it from the infant at her breast. The child who has
caught it from others whilst at school, and brought home in
consequence, will communicate it readily to his brothers and sisters,
although the disease did not exist previously in the family or
neighbourhood, and was brought from a distant part of the country. All
these instances are surely proofs of its infectious character, and
point out the necessity of caution whenever hooping-cough may present
itself in a family, and the necessity which exists for an early removal
of the unaffected children from the sphere of its contagious influence.
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