Sins against the laws of health : illustrated by the vital statistics of the Crosshill District : being a lecture delivered on behalf of the library of the Crosshill Young Men's Christian Association, 29th April, 1880 / by Eben. Duncan.

  • Duncan, Eben.
Date:
1880
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Sins against the laws of health : illustrated by the vital statistics of the Crosshill District : being a lecture delivered on behalf of the library of the Crosshill Young Men's Christian Association, 29th April, 1880 / by Eben. Duncan. 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.

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    person amwering falsely shall be liable to imprisonment, with or without hard labour, or to a penalty not exceeding £20.” The contagious particles of measles are disseminated by a des- quamation of the skin, and by'fhe secretions of the throat and nose, just as in scarlet fever, but the particles of skin are very much smaller and liner; on this account they are more numerous, and arc carried further by currents of air, and so the contagion of measles is more active than the contagion of scarlet fever. Another circumstance which increases the dilliculty of checking the spread of measles is, that it is highly infectious from the very first. F'or four days, while the symptoms are merely those of a bad cold, and before the characteristic rash which reveals its nature appears, the patient may be attending school and mixing freely w'ith his playfellows, so spreading the malady. All the various ways in wliich scarlet fever is carried are equally made use of by the contagious j)articles shed from the skin of the measles patient. It is therefore important that during an epidemic, children suffering from cough and sneezing, etc., should be kept at home. Last year I atteuded, during one fortnight, nine families attacked by measles. In every case the child in the family who first took the disease was attending a par- ticular school, and the other children in the house who w'ere not attending school became subsequently infected through this child. Although no death occurred, this small e])idemic caused a great deal of distress and suffering; one mother took the disease while nursing her children, was seriously ill, and greatly weakened by it. One child had a very long and dangerous illness, through a throat complication which threatened its life, and rendered tlie operation of opening the wdndpipe necessary to prevent death by suffocation. This is one example of the misery which may be brought upon a whole community by one child attending school before the period of desquamation is quite past. In measles, four weeks is the recognised period of infectiveness. Another disease about which there is a ten'jJLdc amount of carelessness is hooping-cough. Time after time I have expostu- latetl with parents about their criminal negligence in allowing their children suffering from this dLsease to play as formerly with the other children of the neighbourhood; and I daresay we have all at some time or other been shocked to fiml oursedves in a railway carriage or a tramway car with a child iu the full course of the disease. It is a common mistake to suppose that hooping- cough is a comparatively harmless complaint. The Registrar- Oeneral’s returns show that it is one of the greatest causes of inlantile mortality in this country, and, besides the actual deaths which occur during its continuance, the loss of food caused by the frequent vomiting after the cough, the loss of sleep, and the bronchial complications may lead in delicate children to sub- sequent tubercular diseases, such as cousumptiou and water in the head.