Selected monographs.

Date:: 1888

Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Selected monographs. Source: Wellcome Collection.

184/440 (page 166)

remarkably clear, succinct, and coraprolicrisive digest of the mass of evidence bearing on this interesting subject. Dr. Alison's statements in his recent pamphlet on the Scottish Poor Laws fully confirm the general opinion. I have only to add, in again partly anticipating details, to which I shall presently advert, that 22 of 30 patients who positively declared to me that they had not in any way been exposed to infection, replied as follows to my inquiries respecting the number who lived together. In three cases there were 4; in seven 5; in two 6 ; in three 7 ; in two 8; in one g ; in one 10; in one 12 ; in one 13. Many of those, who traced their affection clearly to contagion, stated the number of those who lived together as 12 and 13, and in one or two instances, as ''16 at least. This, be it recollected, in one, or at most two small rooms, in the most miserable, darkest, and worst aired purlieus of a large manufacturing city. After the facts I have adduced, I think we may safely con- clude, that animal effluvia, to use the term of Dr. Copland, or emanations from living bodies in close and unventilated situations, possess the property of generating the specific poison, whatever be its nature, that gives rise to exanthematic typhus. With regard to the producing cause of typhoid fever, all is vague and uncertain. Chomel, after his analysis of the causes assigned by patients, remarks (p. 306), Thus, scarcely, out of a number of patients so considerable (ii5), is there one in four who attributes his state to some slightly energetic cause. But what chiefly concerns us to know is, whether the conditions we have seen to be so. powerful m the production of typhus are the same, or anything like the same, in regard to typhoid fever. Exactly on this point, Louis remarks,^ No more can the dwelling in places, low, and inhabited during night by too great a number of indi- viduals, figure among the causes in question, one eighteenth only of the patients being in that condition 3 and he con- cludes, from a comparison of all the commonly assigned causes with the facts ascertained by himself, in these remark- able words : The deepest darkness then prevails regarding the causes of the affection under consideration. Chomel 1 Vol. ii, p. 457-