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

Date:
1850
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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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    Formed by the stellings, was a favourite cause for the last epidemic.* But the only imputed cause of the late epidemic yet published professionally, is that of imported contagion. In the London Medical Gazette of the 20th January, 1838, there appeared a letter from the late Sir Andrew Halliday On the Malignant Fever of British Guiana, in which are published extracts from a letter from Dr. William Fraser, health officer of the Port of Demerara. Sir Andrew remarks: The facts brought forward by Dr. Fraser are, perhaps, the strongest that were ever adduced in confirmation of a certain variety of the yellow fever being highly contagious. And Dr. Fraser himself states in the letter: I maintain, and will prove from circumstances which came under my observation during the prevalence of the epidemic (now, thank God, happily on the wane), that infection alone formed the source and entire medium of its existence and propagation. On the 24th March, 1838, the late Dr. William Ferguson, inspector-general of hospitals, replied in the London Medical Society to the paper of Sir Andrew Halliday. Dr. Ferguson's reply was based on general grounds, acknowledging that his (Dr. Fraser's) cases would be good enough in the way of proof, if we had not others equally good which will show contagion to have been impossible. Dr. Ferguson's reply is distinguished for a bold and manly reliance on principles (the result of former experience), even when ignorant of the circum- stances of the particular case under discussion, and when he admits that appearances are against him. Dr. Ferguson is evidently excited by indignation at an attempt to raise an odium theologicum against the non-contagionists, and retorts lustily against quarantine officers who are paid to discover * [Wherever yellow fever has prevailed, whether in the south of Europe, on the continent of America, or in the West Indies, various and most dis- similar conjectures have been made respecting its cause, not one of which has been satisfactory, enforcing the conclusion, that the true cause is yet unknown. These conjectures are striking examples of the tendency to the pout hoc, propter hoc, mode of reasoning,— the mistaking of sequences for effects* of coincidences for causes, in connexion with hasty generalisation. Every inquirer, who has given close attention to epidemic diseases,—from Hippocrates to Sydenham, and from Sydenham to our contemporaries, — has been forced into the acknowledgment of a hidden cause, a something known only by its effects, impalpable, invisible, distinct from the causes of ordinary diseases, — according to Hippocrates, a something divine; according to Sydenham, a something emanating from the bowels of the earth.]—Ed. E 3