Mr. W. H. Power's report to the local government board on diphtheria at Hern Hill, in the Faversham rural sanitary district ; on the sanitary state of that district ; and on administration by the rural sanitary district.
- Power, W. H.
- Date:
- 1880
Licence: Public Domain Mark
Credit: Mr. W. H. Power's report to the local government board on diphtheria at Hern Hill, in the Faversham rural sanitary district ; on the sanitary state of that district ; and on administration by the rural sanitary district. Source: Wellcome Collection.
Provider: This material has been provided by London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine Library & Archives Service. The original may be consulted at London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine Library & Archives Service.
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![taiued that there had been several cases of sore throat among the school-children since the Harrieses were ill, but there was no clear recollection of the date. The schoolmaster himself, not at all subject to quinsy, had a sore throat with swelling on each side of the neck. But no fatal case occurred in the village. On inquiry at the village of Penally, at the eastern extremity of the district, I did not hear of any cases of sore throat among the school children there. 11. Returning to the family of Harries on the Ridgeway, I could learn nothing as to any conceivable way in which they could have contracted the infection, except that Mrs. Harries was in the habit of carrying butter once a week to Tenby to sell to a grocer. She had been in Tenby for this purpose on Saturday the 13th of September, five days before her daughter was taken ill. There were no children at the grocer’s shop, and no person there was known to have had a sore throat. But the suspicion remains that the diphtheritic infection which hadReen brought into Tenby in April may have remained alive, perhaps renewed by a series of unnoticed sore throats among persons of a class who would not readily send for medical assistance, and that Mrs. Harries may have unwittingly come in contact with some infected person, and may have carried home the infection to her own children. 12. Possibly, by a similar occidt transportation the disease may have been conveyed from the Harries’s cottage on the Ridgeway, or from the (supposed) undercurrent of diphtheria in Tenby, to the Thomases’ house in Jameston. This may be condemned as mere speculation, but the very fact that we are driven to such speculation has a positive value, for unless we may attribute to this infection a ’most transcendent subtlety, we must entertain some theory of origination of diphtheria tie novo. HAVERFORDWEST. [Registrak-General’s Quarterly Return, 1879, Fourth quarter.—District, Haver- fordwest ; Sub-district, St. David’s. Twelve deaths registered from diphtheria. (Seven at Mathry, three at Llanrian.)] 1. In a report to the Board on the sanitary state of the Haverfordwest registration district by Dr. Horace Swete in June 1879, it is mentioned that diphtheria had been especially fatal in the St. David’s and Fishguard sub-districts, that in those districts five deaths were registered in 1876, nine in 1877, ten in 1878, and three in the first five months of 1879. Dr. Swete describes an especially fatal outbreak of this disease in the family of a county magistrate in the parish of Mathry in 1878, in relation with certain structural defects of the dwelling house in which they resided. The last death in that family was on the 6th of February, 1879. There appears then to have been a lull in the epidemic. One death took place in the parish of Lanrian on the 3rd of June, and then no more till the disease broke out afresh in October. It is too late to ask if the interval between these successive deaths was filled by a succession of non-fatal cases. Unfortunately the Medical Officer of Health for this district was unable to keep watch over the course of the epidemic, and no record of its successive phases has been preserved. 2. Among the various cases of diphtheria which occurred in this sub-district in the fourth quarter of 1879, very little connexion could be traced. This is hardly to be wondered at, if we bear in mind how prevalent the disease had been before, and in how many spots the poison had probably been lurking. It might well be supposed (to speak in the language of the germ theory of infection), that the seasonable influence of autumn caused a simultaneous revival of germs that had long lain torpid in many different parts of the district. Three deaths were registered in October, in three different parishes, St. Edrin’s, Mathry, and Llandeloy. At St. Edrin’s a young woman of 19, who was not known to have been in communication with any person suffering from sore throat, but who had been about in parts of the district formerly infested with diphtheria, was taken ill, and died on October 13th. Subsequently her two brothers, aged 15 and 8 were attacked, but recovered. At Llandeloy a young woman of 17 died of diphtheria on October 31st. 3. On October 28th a boy of six years, named Thomas Roberts, died of diphtheria at a lonely cottage (Castle Froga) in a barren expanse of high clayey land -in the parish of Mathry, but far from the village of that name. The two youngest children in the same family, one of 19 months, Jhe other an infant of three months, were afterwards attacked, and died on November 9th and 15th. Two other children aged nine and five, and the](https://iiif.wellcomecollection.org/image/b2499683x_0034.jp2/full/800%2C/0/default.jpg)
