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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    If those who come out of a healthy into an affected district, took the disease, not from the sick, but from the air, then those who avoided the sick would be as Liable to the disease as those who approached and touched them. Is this the fact with the plague ? so notoriously the contrary, that aU modern observers have come to the conclusion that absolute contact, either wdth infected persons or infected clothes, is necessary for the communication of the disease. Hence the security of those who, while the plague is raging, shut themselves up in the very town in which it is raging, and avoid all intercourse with the sick. Why did the rehgious communities at Marseilles, wliich practised tliis seclusion, escape ? Why did the Pomidling Hospital at Moscow, wluch was strictly shut up, escape, while the Pouudling Hospital at Marseilles, which admitted a patient with the plague, was swept of its population? Wliy at Malta, in 1813, was the plague kept out of the Military Hospital, although it was raging in the ground-floor, while, in the houses in the immediate neighboiu-- hood, the disease was not only getting access to the ground-floors, but climbing to the very garrets ? Wliy did the R-ench medical oflicers, in Egyjot, die in crowds, wliilst they di-essed the patients, and as soon as the task of touching and dressing them was put upon the Tui'kish barbers, why was the mortality transferred from the surgeons to the barbers ? Why did the troops employed by Sii* Tliomas Maitland to suppress the plague at Malta escape the disease, altliough they were, not only in the same district, but in the same streets in which it was raging ? In short, for we might have saved ourselves tliis recitation of facts, why is the practice of seclusion, or shutting up, as it is called, practised by the European factories in places liable to the plague, an effectual preventive of the disease ? If it is said that those persons keep aloof in the healthy districts, then are the healthy and sick districts often separated by a distance only of a few feet—then is the definition of a healthy district, a place in which the healthy shut themselves up ? then is a man able to plant himself in the midst of a sick district, draw rouud liim a magic wand, and say to the noxious atmosphere. So far shalt thou come, and no farther ? Moses's rod had not more power over the waters of the Eed Sea, than is here attributed to human volition over a contaminated atmosphere. Now for the second proposition, that ' the visits of the sick to un- ' affected places is [are] followed by no increase of disease. In the