Second report on quarantine : yellow fever : with appendices / [by the] General Board of Health.

  • Great Britain. General Board of Health
Date:
1852
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Second report on quarantine : yellow fever : with appendices / [by the] General Board of Health. 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.

    77/428 (page 69)
    required in other cases to establish a fact antecedently im- probable. In our First Report we observed that sucli authorities as Drs. Haygarth, Percival, Ferrier, Carmichael Smith, Currie, Russell, Roberts, Arnott, Christison, and others, deny that exhalations from the living body are capable of permanent suspension in the atmosphere, or that they can be conveyed unchanged through pure air to great distances. They regard it as estaldished by an indubi- table body of evidence, that the moment these exhalations come in contact with the external atmosphere, they are diffused through it: that by such diffusion their injurious properties are destroyed, and that, though when pent up in close unventilated rooms or filthy ships they may acquire some degree of permanence, and much concen- tration and virulence, yet, when they once pass into the ocean of air, they disappear as a drop of rain in the ocean of water. These authorities view the property thus possessed by air to neutralize and destroy these exha- lations as a provision of nature for our well-being. We further observed that if the emanations thrown off from the living body formed permanent and powerful poisons like the miasma produced by decomposition, and if like such products they were capable of being conveyed unchanged to great distances, we should be able to live only in solitude; we could never meet in society, for we should poison each other; the first symptom of illness would be the signal for the abandonment of the sick, and we should be compelled by a due regard to self-preser- vation to withhold from persons afflicted with disease every degree of assistance that required personal attend- ance. But our physical, is in harmony with our social consti- tution, and not a contradiction to it. The necessity of intercourse between all the members of the human family is one of the final necessities of our race. The poiicy of encouraging and facilitating that intercourse among all the nations of the earth is one of the iavourable distinctions of our age. The great discoveries in science, the Avon- derful lacilities ^hich have resulted from some of them for ])erKonal and commercial transit and correspondence, all