Quarantine and the plague : being a summary of the report on these subjects recently addresed to the Royal Academy of Medicine in France ; with introductory observations, extracts from parliamentary correspondence, and notes / By Gavin Milroy.

  • Gavin Milroy
Date:
1846
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Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Quarantine and the plague : being a summary of the report on these subjects recently addresed to the Royal Academy of Medicine in France ; with introductory observations, extracts from parliamentary correspondence, and notes / By Gavin Milroy. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine Library & Archives Service. The original may be consulted at London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine Library & Archives Service.

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    property of inducing like symptoms in him. Here there is no palpable or substantial virus, as in the former case, that can be directly transferred from one individual to another, either by simple contact or yet by inoculation ; at all events, the effluvium or morbific miasm is not appreciable by any of our senses. All that we know of it is from its effects ; for we find that, when an individual in health remains for some time in the immediate neighbour- hood of a patient labouring under such a disease, he is liable to become affected with it, although there has been no contact with, nor even any close approximation to, the sick person. Moreover, there is every reason to believe that the disease would never be communicated by mere contact with the patient's body, if it could be so arranged that the person, on whom such an experiment was made, did not inhale the contaminated atmosphere. Hooping-cough and Scarlatina are examples of this order of communi- cable or transmissible diseases. They propagate themselves by infecting the atmosphere : hence they are properly called infectious, in contradis- tinction to the former order which are termed contagious. In the French Report, the expression miasmatic infection is generally used to designate this mode of transmission. Some writers indeed, men too of acknowledged ability, have objected to the distinction now made between contagious and infectious diseases, on the ground that infection (in the sense we have used it) is nothing more than a mere variety, kind, or peculiar mode of contagion. In both sets of diseases, they say, there is the application of a morbific matter to the body of a person in health; the only marked difference being that, hi the one case, the poison is cognisable by our senses, and, by being applied to one point of the body, in general excites the disease primarily in that spot; whereas, in the other case, it is diffused through the atmosphere and is im- bibed into the system, over a much larger surface, by the lungs, and, it may be, also by the skin, and even by the stomach. In both cases, therefore, there is contact. Now we are not at all disposed to deny the logical accu- racy of the objection ; and, were the question before us one of mere theo- retical or technical interest, we might be inclined to admit its validity. But, when we come to look at it in a practical point of view, and more es- pecially to consider it in reference to measures of prophylactic treatment, we shall at once perceive the importance of distinguishing such diseases as are simply and only contagious, from those which are simply a?id only in- fectious. It is surely unnecessary to adduce examples to prove the truth of this remark. Suffice it to say that no prudent mother would be satis- fied with the same precautions to prevent the spreading of Hooping-cough in her family as with those she used to prevent the spreading of Ringworm ; and need we remind our readers how much cruel suffering, as well as vex- atious annoyance and extortionate expence, might be annually spared, if the difference between infection and contagion were always recomised in the lazarettos for the Plague ? The miseries that have been so long, and still are, inflicted on thousands irom the almost universal and exclusive adoption of the notion that the plague is transmissible by contact alone, are only to be equalled by the ridiculously absurd puerilities of which it has been the prolific source. Before quitting the subject of infectious diseases, we must call the reader s attention for a few moments to a circumstance connected with
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