Observations on the history and treatment of dysentery and its combinations : with an examination of their claims to a contagious character, and an enquiry into the source of contagion in its analogous diseases, angina, erysipelas, hospital gangrene and puerperal fever / by William Harty.

Date:
1847
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Observations on the history and treatment of dysentery and its combinations : with an examination of their claims to a contagious character, and an enquiry into the source of contagion in its analogous diseases, angina, erysipelas, hospital gangrene and puerperal fever / by William Harty. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh. The original may be consulted at the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh.

    163/364 (page 139)
    temper(a). Again, the dysentery that is commu- nicated is not dysentery merely, but dysentery in combination with the fever. This assertion of an incontrovertible fact is amply borne out by the multifarious authorities already quoted, such as Prin- gle, Hoffman, Zimmermann, Vignes, Grimm, Frank, &c. His second argument consists in the statement' that this [the typhoid] form of dysentery is often present where a case of typhus cannot be found. Now for this statement no authority is given, such as might be investigated ; but is not Dr. C. well aware that, under favourable circumstances (such as those recapitulated by Frank and others), there is no disease more readily superinduced or sponta- neously generated than typhus, a position fully sup- ported by the several authorities already quoted in illustration of this very typhoid variety, and which (a) This statement is borne out by a singular analogy with puerperal contagious fever, illustrated by the following facts from p. 490 of Barker's and Cheyne's Account of the Epidemic Fever in Ireland: About the termination of the epidemic, puerperal fever arose in the Lying-in Hospital of Dublin, and was fatal to many of the patients. A circumstance related to us by Mr. Creighton, Surgeon to the Foundling Hospital, would seem to prove that the connexion between these fevers, which has often been suspected, actually exists. Two infants, whose mothers had died of puerperal fever in the Lying-in Hospital, were sent from that establishment to the Foundling Hospital, where, after being washed, and their clothes cleansed, they were given to two healthy nurses ; these nurses both took typhus within a fortnight, and were sent to the Fever Hospital in Cork-street.