On some of the most important diseases of women : with other papers / prefatory essay by R. Ferguson.

  • Robert Gooch
Date:
1859
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: On some of the most important diseases of women : with other papers / prefatory essay by R. Ferguson. 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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    Pox Hospital), ' at tlie time Dr. Jenner's publication appeared, no ' cow-pox matter could be procured, for tlie disease then had become ' extinct, nor was it expected to return till the spring, the period at ' which it usually affects the cows. Towards the latter end of ' January last, I was informed that the cow-pox had appeared ' among several of the milch-cows kept in Gray's Inn Lane, and ' about four-fifths of them were eventually infected.' It appears, therefore, that contagious diseases prevail much at one time, and little at another, and, consequently, that two things are. requisite for their ready propagation; the one, the contagious matter itself, the other, a diffused cause, supposed to be a state of the atmosphere favourable to its action. Let it never be forgotten, that tliis is the case with diseases unquestionably and notoriously con- tagious, and, therefore, that when it is found to be the case with the plague it can be no objection to the belief of its being also contagious. Are the anti-contagionists ignorant of these facts? In this, and other instances which we shall have occasion to notice, the error is so extraordinary, that it is really difficult to refer it to ignorance. But we go on. The anti-contagionists, describing epidemic diseases, say, 'People are attacked, not in proportion as the inhabitants of the ' affected mix with those of the unaffected places; but, in propor- ' tion as the inhabitants of unaffected expose themselves to the ' air of affected places. The visits of the sick to unaffected places ' is [are] followed by no increase of disease; the visits of the in- *■ habitants of an unaffected, to an affected place, is [are] attended ' with a certain degree of sickness. On their removal from a ' noxious to a pure air, the sick often rapidly recover; but they do ' not communicate the disease to the inhabitants of a pixre atmo- ' sphere; in the history of all the epidemics which have ever prevailed, ' in all parts of the earth, there is not on record a single example of ' the communication of the disease from the sick to the healthy in a ' pure atmosphere.'—West. Rev. No. Y. p. 145. Here are, put only in several forms, two propositions:—First, that when the people of healthy districts visit the affected districts, they take the disease, not from the sick, but from the air. Secondly, that when the sick move from an affected to a healthy district, they speedily recover, and do not give the disease to others. Let us take these propositions, and try them in their application to the plague.