Reprints of articles contributed to medical journals, 1895-1909 / by John D. Gimlette.

  • Gimlette, John D. (John Desmond), 1867-1934
Date:
1911
Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

Credit: Reprints of articles contributed to medical journals, 1895-1909 / by John D. Gimlette. Source: Wellcome Collection.

    100/160 (page 96)
    A period of seven years’ service in the Government of the Federated Malay States, spent in the States of Pahang, Selangor, and Perak, has given me experience of puru, and a further residence of over two vears in Kelantan, a Malay State hitherto unexplored by students of tropical medicine, and one in which this disease is most prevalent, has afforded me an unusual opportunity of observing it under purely native con- ditions. My contention is that the puru of the Malay Peninsula is identical with the West Indian and African yaws and the Fijian coko, and that it has no real relationship with syphilis. The History of Puru. The earliest references which can be taken as bear- ing upon puru are by Bontius in 1718, who seems to have recognised it in the Molucca Islands as the amboina pocks [2], and by Marsden, who mentioned a native disease called nambi in his “ History of Sumatra ” (1811) [3]. Many years later, Charlouis, who described fram- boesia from Java as polypapilloma tropicum [4], gave one of the local native names as nambie. But up till now (1886) even Hirsch had been led from want of records to assume that the mainland of Further India had been little, if at all, visited by framboesia or yaws [5]. Ten years later a definite outbreak was reported from Assam [6], and yaws has quite recently been described as being very common in Siam [7]. In 1893, Dr. Brown described puru from Penang as lupus contagiosus malayorum [8], and in an annota- tion on this important paper, Dr. T. Colcott Fox drew attention to the similarity of puru to yaws, but finally concluded that puru was the same as Oriental sore, and in 1897 the name was given as a synonym of that disease in Allbutt’s “ System of Medicine ” [9]. It has since been shown that the appearance of some true Oriental or Delhi sores is by no means so