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.

    88/428 (page 80)
    poofs, it has been unquestionably ascertained, that eveiy jmrt of D\\ Chishohn's account, which asserts the communication of any disease from the • Hankey' to the ' Charon' and ' Scorpion,' wa« a mischievous falsehood, fabricated without the smallest foun- dation or particle of truth, since the latter ship did not lose a single man during her whole voyage, and the 'Charon' lost only four from causes described by Dr. Trotter, and wholly foreign to the ' Hankey.' With a view to sustain the allegations of Dr. Chisholm respecting this alleged case of importation, Sir William Pym states that the health of Jamaica previously to the arrival of the Hankey was good, and in support of this statement quotes the authority of Dr. Hunter as to the salubrity of Fort Augusta and Stoney Hill. On consulting Dr. Hunter's observations on the diseases of the army in Jamaica, says Dr. Gillkrest we find it is indeed true that that writer speaks favourably of the two above- mentioned localities; but they are expressly mentioned among exceptions, and by way of contrast with the sickly, nay deadly state, of other parts of the island during the period referred to. Thus at p. 1 ], Dr. Hunter says, ' Four regiments were sent from England in 1780 to Jamaica; they arrived there the 1st of August, and before the end of January ensuing, not quite six months, one-half of them nearly were dead, and a consider- able part of the remainder ^vere unfit for service.' At p. 57, he says, ' An average of the number of sick during three years and a half, in which are included the convalescents, gives one-third of the army unfit for service at the time of the greatest sickness, and one-eighth at the time of the least sickness. The average of deaths annually upon the whole is nearly one in four, and of discharged men about one in eight, which, together, makes the loss three-eights of the whole. In less than four years there died in the island of Jamaica 3,500 men; those that were discharged amounted to one-half of that number, which make in all 5,250 men lost to the service in that short period of time from the climate and other causes of mortality, without a man dying by the hands of the enemy.' Speaking of the symptons of the disease, p. 64, he says, ' The vomiting is sometimes constant and violent, especially in the worst kind of the disease, and the blood being frequently in a dissolved state is forced into the stomach and thrown up, form- ing, what has been called by the Spaniards the black vomit.' •' Is it then credible, asks Dr. Gillkrest, that with this book before him the British Superintendent of Quarantine should write the following, at p. 59 of his second edition ? ' These quotations, from the highest authority, prove that