Zymotic diseases : their correlation and causation / By A. Wolff.

  • Wolff, Abraham, 1819-1892.
Date:
1872
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Zymotic diseases : their correlation and causation / By A. Wolff. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by King’s College London. The original may be consulted at King’s College London.

    144/196 (page 130)
    EFIDEMICS—SMALL-POX. O’Ryan of Lyons, wlio placed several children round an oval table whose least diameter was three feet, and in the centre he placed dossils of lint and of silk strongly impregnated with variolous matter taken from persons labouring under either the natural or the inoculated small-pox. This experiment was repeated every morning for a week—sometimes in the open air, and sometimes in an apartment— without any of the children being affected, since they all remained free from the disease nine months afterwards. There are examples on record of small-pox having broken out in a regiment marching in India where the men, previously healthy, were many miles from any probable source of contagion. When we refer back to the pathology of small- pox, we find that the symptoms during life are in strict analogy with the phenomena presented by other varieties of zymotic disease that are known to be produced by decaying organic matter—when small-pox assumes the form of epidemic, such epi- demic observes the same laws of diffusion and of decline as regulate the epidemics of cholera and of typhus, and in the dead-house the body gives evidence of structural disintegration in accordance with the texture affected. Little doubt can be entertained that when the minds of physicians are directed to the possible occurrence of small-pox otherwise than by contagion,