The general response and the local response to infection depend not only upon the intensity and the nature of the attack, but also upon the patient’s psychological state and his physical health at the time of the invasion. An absence of fever and leukocytes in pneumatically pneumonia, for instance, indicates a poor response and a bad prognosis. This is especially liable to occur in elderly or alcoholic subjects. It has long been recognized that the mental attitude of the patient towards his affliction can affect his power of recovery.
In addition, those individuals who have been in contact with serious and highly infectious diseases like smallpox are placed in quarantine. The term is derived from the original period of forty days compulsory isolation of ships after leaving a port where certain infectious diseases were raging. The duration of quarantine has come to be two days more than the maximum known incubation period of the disease in question. For the common infectious fevers of childhood a period of observation has replaced quarantine.
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