Further reports by Surgeon-General Hunter on the cholera epidemic in Egypt.
- Hunter, William Guyer.
- Date:
- 1883
Licence: Public Domain Mark
Credit: Further reports by Surgeon-General Hunter on the cholera epidemic in Egypt. Source: Wellcome Collection.
Provider: This material has been provided by Royal College of Physicians, London. The original may be consulted at Royal College of Physicians, London.
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![the fact that on the 22nd, towards evening, Dr. Ferrari visited a patient who was suffering from vomiting and a very abundant watery diarrhoea. The individual was being brought home on an ass ; he died during the night. Being thus obliged to look upon this as the first case officially established, we will add that the patient was a man of 80, called Boutros Hanna Issa, a Syrian, established here for many years, a janissary of the Trench Consulate, living in extreme poverty in one low damp room with his family of seven persons. But public opinion at Damietta looks upon a man called Hassan Nour-el-Din, of whose life we subjoin a short biography, as having been first attacked by the epidemic. He was 45 or 50 years of age, an Egyptian born in Damietta, who had always lived in that town, and had left it rarely ; he was a mason by trade. He had left Damietta on the morning of the 21st June to go to Mansourah ; he did not feel ill before leaving, and no member of his family had noticed that he was in any way unwell; he began to feel unwell at Mansourah on the following day, that is on the 22nd, and on Saturday, the 23rd June, he took the train at Talka to go back to Damietta. All this time he was still able to walk, and had neither vomitings nor diarrhoea, but on reaching the station at Ras-el-Khalig he was overtaken by the disease, and got worse and worse till he arrived at Damietta, where they where obliged to carry him on men’s shoulders from the station to his house, which he reached on the 23rd June before sunset; he succumbed about midnight, and was buried next day, Sunday, the 24th. The opinion that this man may well have been among the first who came under the infection should not be rejected. The date of these two deaths do not enable us to fix the interval which elapsed between these supposed first attacks and those that followed, as on the 23rd June the death-rate was already shown by the registers to be twenty-three. We must here repeat that it was only after this fresh augmentation had been noticed that the doctor of the town and Dr. Ferrari began to see the sick ; they saw seven on the morning of the 23rd June ; telegrams were then also sent from Damietta to Alexandria, signed by several Consuls, and in particular by Dr. Ferrari, announcing that a disease, probably cholera, had appeared at Damietta. The result was that two Medical Committees, the one sent by the Board of Health, and the other by the Maritime Sanitary and Quarantine Board, arrived on the spot on the 24th, and after inquiry, declared that it was epidemic cholera. Without being too precise as to the exact date of the outbreak of this disease, we think we may take two or three days before the 22nd .June as the date ; that is, the 16th, 15th, and 14th of Shaban, which was the time that the people left after the eight days’ fair. But bearing in mind the rapid rise in the mortality, we are inclined to believe that in any case the present disease broke out suddenly at Damietta. It broke out in the district of Souk-el-Bibeh, one of the most unhealthy and most densely populated in the town; the disease was, to a certain extent, localized there for the first three days of its spread, and gradually crept out thence to the other parts of the town ; and we would here note that up till now the malady has found but few victims among the negro servants, in some of the houses forming the long frontage west of the town facing the Nile, and inhabited by the moderately well-off. Finally, the disease, behaving like a true epidemic, has spread itself along the Nile Valley, and is now supreme in many places in Lower Egypt. § IV.—Nature and Progress of the present Epidemic. The cholera epidemic, which has raged at Damietta since the 22nd June, continued to increase up to the 1st July, on which day it reached its highest point. As it thus increased, the malady showed every characteristic of an epidemic, attacking all, without distinction of age, sex, or race ; it has not, however, as yet, attacked any European; it sometimes kills almost instantaneously ; at others, the sufferer recovers without the aid of any medical treatment, often with the least care ; but very often the disease resists all remedies. Diarrhoea is the predominating symptom with persons attacked by the cholera; vomiting is also noticed, but it is not persistent; the phenomenon of algidity is not very marked; cramps also are less often to be noticed than is usual. But since the 1st July the disease decreased after remaining some days stationary ; cases thenceforward became milder, were loss sudden, and yielded oftener to treatment. But recovery then became incomplete and irregular, and we have often noticed cases which passed into the typhoid state; for some days now it has been observed that the period of recovery ends in a crisis, at which an erythmatose eruption, [1314] E](https://iiif.wellcomecollection.org/image/b24975370_0027.jp2/full/800%2C/0/default.jpg)
