Observations on the statistics of hernia, and on the anatomical causes which determine its production / by Robert Knox.

  • Robert Knox
Date:
[1837]
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Observations on the statistics of hernia, and on the anatomical causes which determine its production / by Robert Knox. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by The University of Glasgow Library. The original may be consulted at The University of Glasgow Library.

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    from the 10th of an inch to a length of at least {'^. They have a digestive tube divided into numerous compartments or saccu- lated ; a mouth unarmed. The appearance which may have led naturalists to suppose the head armed, seems to me merely a rudimentary nervous system; viz. a cephalic ganglion, collar, and two nervous filaments proceeding from these. Along with the specimens, Mr Dick had the kindness to furnish me with the following interesting particulars. I have found these worms, (Mr Dick remarks,) in several horses, and at different stages of their growth, from the size of a pin point, to that of an inch and a-half in length, and in two instances, in the blood-vessels. They seem almost always to produce a bad form of diarrhoea, and seem to depend on the food or situation in which the ani- mal has been previously kept. The horses I have found affected with these, have always been running out previous to their becoming ill.'''' These remarks by Mr Dick, remind me strongly of what I observed at the Cape many years ago. On the north-eastern frontier of that colony, horses are generally turned out to pas- ture throughout the whole year; they run, as the phrase is, night and day, and indeed are seldom or ever under a covered stable. During the winter months, in consequence of the almost annual droughts, the pasture is very scanty, and at times thousands of horned cattle, and a proportionate number of horses, die of abso- lute want, the improvident farmer having nothing in store for them. The horses are at this time much infested with intes- tinal worms, which leave them spontaneously with the first showers of spring, these giving rise to a most luxuriant growth of herbage in an incredibly short space of time, and covering with the richest pasture, in a very few days, a vast range of country, over which a single blade of fresh grass could not a few days previous be discovered. It was in the same colony that I observed the tape-worm, infest- ing the human body to an extent altogether inexplicable. The official facts have been recorded in the seventeenth volume (p. 384) of this Journal. Somewhat more than 2000 healthy men, mostly in the prime of life, were marched into Caff'raria; they were undeniably the healthiest body of men I have ever seen. There was not a single person on the sick list. In two months there- after, they became affected with tape-worm in the ratio of near- ly 30 per cent. The disease attacked officers and men. As the climate was excellent, no assignable cause for this extraor- dinary endemic ever occurred to me, excepting the fact of their food consisting solely, during the greater part of the campaign, of bad bread and of still worse beef; the flesh of over-driven, starved cattle, and of a quaUty rejected even by the naked savages, the CafFres.
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