Volume 1

Clinical researches on disease in India / by Charles Morehead.

Charles Morehead

Date:: 1856

Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Clinical researches on disease in India / by Charles Morehead. Source: Wellcome Collection.

42/736 page 22

Natives of different castes in Bombay, selected for the purpose of clinical instruction, there was not a single instance of the quartan form. I am unable to speak with the same precision of 1344 cases of intermittent fever which passed through the European General Hos- pital at Bombay, during the period of my service in that Institution; but I am certain that if any quartans occurred, they must have been very few in number. That tertians are more common than quotidians, is an observation altogether opposed to my experience, and, I believe, it may be added, to that of observers m India generally. Adverting again to the 243 clinical cases, I find that 211 were quotidians and 27 tertians, and that of five the type had not been recorded. In the European General Hospital the fact of the greater prevalence of the quotidian type, more particularly during the mala- rious months, in first attacks, in seamen, the military staff of the garrison, and the poorer classes of the fixed resident European community, has also been noted by me. Nor has my observation on this point been limited to the Island of Bombay. At an earlier period of my service, while doing duty with Her Majesty's 4th Light Dragoons, at Kirkee in the Deccan, I have recorded in my notes the same fact of the cases of intermittent fever which occurred in that regiment during the monsoon season. Though the quotidian is undoubtedly the most fre- quent form of the disease in India, still the tertian is also of common occurrence. Nor is it difficult to point to the circumstances under which these two types respectively present themselves. Quotidians will be found to prevail most generally at those seasons of the year when the generation of

digitised image 1

digitised image 2

digitised image 3