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.

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    ally, attacked its victims under two different forms, characterized chiefly by the absence or presence of the acute epigastric pain. There can be little won- der that Degner should deem his epidemic conta- gious (though disputed by his contemporaries), when we know what contrariety of opinion (even after all our experience of the disease) prevailed, and still prevails in the Profession, respecting the contagious character of the Indo-European cholera of 1832. I had some experience of it under very peculiar cir- cumstances, whence I concluded it to be diffused, like influenza, by atmospheric influence, and not by contagion, except, perhaps, in those cases where the patient rallied from the first attack, and died of the consecutive fever(a). Degner, however, will admit (a) I have stated those circumstances, and the grounds of that opinion, in a paper published in the third volume of the Dublin Medical Journal for 1833. The late Dr. James Johnson, in his Eeview for January, 1832, p. 272, anticipated the same view of the subject: Is it not more rational, he asks, to attribute this [i. e. cholera], as well as other epidemics, to some general cause, of which we are ignorant, while the emanations from the sick in crowded, filthy, and unventilated apartments endow the epidemic with a malignity and even an infectious character, not attendant on its origin or essential to its nature? Can we much wonder that in such places, where whole families were huddled together in one room, with little food and less clothing, a malig- nancy and infection were superadded to the original epidemic? The same takes place in fever, in dysentery, in erysipelas, and in many other diseases. And elsewhere (p. 208), he says it is clear that the proportion of cases in which fever follows the choleric symptoms is much greater in Europe than in India, and this may