Some account of the last yellow fever epidemic of British Guiana / by Daniel Blair ; edited by John Davy.

Date:
1850
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Some account of the last yellow fever epidemic of British Guiana / by Daniel Blair ; edited by John Davy. 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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    slightest inconvenience except in the trouble of dressing them — are called chronic and constitutional, and no attempt is made to heal them; indeed, bad consequences have resulted from healing up such ulcers. Among the immigrants, particularly the Portuguese and the Coolies, the ulcer is generally sloughy, phagedenic, bleeding, and sometimes a perfect sphacelus without even surrounding or previous erythema. The malaria of the Colony, and the small wounds of insects and serrated grasses, are predisposing and exciting causes in the production of these ulcers of the immigrants. The ulcers chiefly affect the lower extremities, but the fingers are sometimes affected, and even the lips and cheeks. Two species of malaria seem to be endemic, as elicited particularly by observing the diseases of the thousands of immigrant settlers lately arrived here, and who present themselves for treatment at the Colonial Hospital. There seems to be both an ancemiating* and a septic malaria. The former pervades the colony, so that a rosy cheek is no where to be found after a year's residence; but it least affects the sea- shore. Its intensity increases as we proceed into the interior up the narrow creeks and muddy rivers. There the complexion becomes perfectly etiolated, even without an attack of inter- mittent ; the spleen gets enlarged, the cellular tissue infiltrated, and dyspnoea and palpitations supervene from mere whiteness (loss of the red particles) and thinness of blood. An anasmiated immigrant Portuguese residing eight or ten miles up the river may get an ulcer, but although the granulations are pale, and the progress of cure is slow, the sore will heal kindly; there seems to be no virus present. Another immigrant Portuguese of equal residence, but with a still tolerably healthy appearance, will show himself at the hospital with a gangrenous phagedena speedily destroying the soft and solid parts, and if amputation be necessary from the irrecoverable condition of the limb, gangrene will probably attack the stump within twenty-four hours. Both patients have been subject to intermittent fever, * [An influence such as that above referred to seems to be common in the West Indies: it is strongly marked by the pale, sallow, sickly hue of the white Creoles, especially in Barbados. There, if they have any colour, it is most frequently reddish ; whence the labourers of this class have been called red legs. One rarely witnesses that bronzing of the exposed skin in the West, which is the almost constant effect of exposure to the sun's rays in the East, Indies and in the South of Europe.]—Ed.