Selected essays and monographs : translations and reprints from various sources.

Date:
1897
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Selected essays and monographs : translations and reprints from various sources. Source: Wellcome Collection.

    277/476 (page 245)
    No one with experience of the disease can, we think, read these extracts without seeing that they give a clear description of its main points quite sufficient for diagnostic purposes. “ Pustuke,” as in Dr. MacGregor’s account of “ Coko,” is unfortunate, as an accumulation of pus is thought a not uncommon accident ■ only met with in a small minority of the excrescences. The axilla is a jDlace where Dr. Nicholls states it was not observed. In another portion of the same paper by Easton he refers to the hair turning white in the affected skin. This certainly does not take place in “ Coko,” in the cases of yaws we have seen here, or in those described by Dr. Nicholls. It is probably a confusion with leprosy. 2. After emancipation in the West Indies the yaws houses were abandoned, as well as any other attempts at isolation, and the disease does not seem to have attracted the attention of medical men. Dr. Nicholls very plausibly urges that it was becoming generalized, the former inmates of the yaws houses scattered over the country acting as foci. In British Guiana during this period little attention seems to have been paid to it. It is not mentioned by Blair in the introduction to his work on yellow fever, in which most of the diseases of the colony are mentioned. Mr. Kodway believes that it was “ much less ” prevalent. As, however, methods of treatment were handed down from this period to present practitioners, it must still have been recognized. The yaws houses were disused and no means were taken to isolate cases of the disease. In the sixties we have proof that it was common in the adjoining islands of Leguan and Wakenaam, and that cases occurred elsewhere. 3. The third period.—The third period is that within the memory of present practitioners, and during this period Dr. Nicholls shows that there has been on the whole a decided and in some cases an alarming increase in its prevalence in most of the islands. The steady increase has been diversified by more or less aboitive attempts at stamping it out, by segregation, voluntary or compulsory notification and treatment. At the outset these attempts had to encounter a prejudice in