On continuous molecular changes, more particularly in their relation to epidemic diseases : being the oration delivered at the 80th anniversary of the Medical Society of London / by John Snow.

  • John Snow
Date:
1853
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: On continuous molecular changes, more particularly in their relation to epidemic diseases : being the oration delivered at the 80th anniversary of the Medical Society of London / by John Snow. 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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    Yellow fever and dysentery are also most prevalent in the low and marshy parts of hot countries. Such situations are sometimes said to be productive of diseases; but this expression is obviously incorrect, when applied to those disorders which are commu- nicable from person to person, either directly or in- directly. There is one class of diseases—intermittent fevers— which are so fixed to particular places that they have deservedly obtained the name of endemics. They spread occasionally, however, much beyond their ordinary localities, and become epidemic. Intermittent fevers are undoubtedly often connected with a marshy state of the soil; for draining the land frequently causes their disappearance. They sometimes, however, exist as endemics, where there is no marshy land or stagnant water within scores of miles. Towards the end of the seventeenth century, intermittent fevers were, for the first time, attributed by Lancisi to noxious effluvia arising from marshes. These supposed effluvia, or marsh miasmata, as they were afterwards called, were thought to arise from decomposing vege- table and animal matter; but, as intermittent fevers have prevailed in many places where there was no decomposing vegetable or animal matter, this opinion has been given up in a great measm-e; still the belief in miasmata or malaria of some kind, as a cause of iutermittents, is very general. It must be acknow- ledged, however, that there is no direct proof of the
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