Plague : papers relating to the modern history and recent progress of Levantine plague / prepared from the time to time by direction of the president of the Local Government Board, with other papers ; sented to both House of Parliament by Command of Her Majesty.

  • Radcliffe, Netten.
Date:
1879
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Plague : papers relating to the modern history and recent progress of Levantine plague / prepared from the time to time by direction of the president of the Local Government Board, with other papers ; sented to both House of Parliament by Command of Her Majesty. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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

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    subjected (as threatened by Egypt) to a like period of quarantine in Egyptian ports. (/) In Rus- In the course of May 1876, the Russian Government issued an Order requiring that sian ports. j^ealth of all vessels arriving at Eussian ports from the southern ports of the Black Sea should be countersigned by a Russian Consul stationed on that coast. (Despatch, Constantinople, 24th May), (sr.) In Meso- With reference to the measures adopted in Mesopotamia since the reappearance of potamia, 1877. pjaguc there at the close of the past (1876) and beginning of the present year, the Ottoman General Board of Health determined on the 4th April 1877, that it would abstain from the use of any restrictive measures applied within or around Bagdad, and that it would limit the efforts of its agents there to assisting and isolating as far as possible those smitten by the malady, removing the occupants away from the apartments where they were taken ill, so as to cleanse and disinfect them. In order, however, to protect the adjoining provinces, quarantine measures, assisted by a military force, would be established at the same stations where they were carried out last year (Despatch, Dr. E. D. Dickson, 4th April 1877). With regard to Bagdad, on the occurrence of suspected cases of plague in the city in February, a Sanitary Commission was appointed for the purpose of making house-to- house visits, cleansing houses and streets, disinfecting latrines, and filling up all the stagnant pools in the town. When a house was attacked by the malady, its inmates were removed from it into huts outside the city, and the sick separated from the healthy. These measures, it would appear, however, so far as they affected sick persons and dwelling-houses, gave rise to dissatisfaction among the Mahommedan population. Complaint was made to the authorities of the great inconvenience caused by their execution, and a request was preferred that the old system of surrounding the infected houses (which the previous year had helped to provoke serious rioting) might be reverted to in lieu of the above-mentioned mode of dealing with them. The complainants, moreover, in addition, declared their aversion to all sanitary regulations, as they believed them to be contrary to the principles of their faith (Despatch, Dr. E. D. Dickson, ]5th March 1877). June 1877. APPENDIX TO FOREGOING MEMORANDUM. A German physician, Dr. Bemhard Beck, resident in Bagdad, in a letter dated the 21st March 1876, of which a translation has been forwarded by Consul-General Nixon,* questioned the accuracy of diagnosis of the disease then prevalent in Bagdad and the adjacent country as phigue. He wrote of the disease as a new disease hitherto unobserved, which, with the exception of swelling of the glands, resembled very closely the malarious fevers (intermittent and pernicioiis) of the countiy ; and he proposed to name the disease bubonic fever, or pestine or pseudo-plague, and held that it stood in the same relation to plague as cholerine to cholera. In a communication, moreover, dated the 31st March 1876, and published in the Wiener Medizinische Wohchenschrift, under the signature B. B. (Nos. .20, 21,23,1876), Dr. Beck, after having seen 100 cases, wrote: I do not hesitate to say that we have here to deal with a malarious fever epidemic, somewhat of a pernicious intermittent and remittent type, and I am, therefore, of opinion that we have not to do with the actual plague. As this fever is almost always accompanied by swelling of the glands, that appears to be the reason why it has been called plague. In this communication Dr. Beck proposed to name the disease febris intermittens bubonica. The following is Dr. Beck's description of the disease, given in his letter of the 21st March :— On the first day rigor; on the next, vomiting of a yellowish-green bilious liquid, and appear- ance of adenitis, chiefly axillary, inguinal, and crural; the tongue moist, white, velvety; face little altered; pulse 100 to 140; temperature 39° to 41'6° (Centigrade); buboes hard, painful, up to size of fist. In severe cases insensibility, coma, somnolence, delirium, dry tongue, livid face, petechiee on extremities, albuminous urine. As regards contagiousness I possess no sufficient proofs. After a laxative (patients are generally constipated), and after the action of large doses of quinine, I observed in most cases a remarkable improvement. Subsequently Dr. Beck stated, that large doses of quinine were very effectual in the pernicious marsh fever, the pretended ' plague.' From no other source has information reached this Department of the successful trea tment of tli bubonic malady by quinine. It will be observed that Dr. Beck, as Dr. Naranzi in 1867, (see foot- note in my previous Memorandum, and p. 10 of these papers,) while doubting that this malady is plague, believes it to be a new form of malarial affection. Dr. Naranzi proposed to designate the disease non-contagious plague-like typhus {typhus loimdide non-contagieitx). * This letter appears to have been addressed to one of the Vienna medical journals, but I have not been able to discover the particular journal in which it appears.