Licence: Public Domain Mark
Credit: A treatise on relapsing or famine fever / by R.T. Lyons. 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.
223/408 (page 207)
![was not air) of tliis place, nearly suffocated me, no atten- tion having been paid to tlie commonest cleg^nliness. Seven individuals had already died out of this house from the epidemic. Many other houses in the same village were similarly circumstanced. It is not surprising that this village suffered severely, and that one division of it was depopulated to a man. Shirreff elsewhere observed, on the other hand, that wherever the ventilation and other condi- tions were good, the disease was rendered innocuous. The reader will remember Hunter's account of the stockings of one of the native crew of the Indiamen. B. Exciting Causes, 1. Contagion. Murchison states that amongst European observers, all have believed relapsing fever to be contagious, except Craigie and Virchow. Craigie considered that the belief that it was contagious was a presumption rather than a well-founded inference. It would appear, however, that this opinion was expressed while the Edinburgh epidemic of 1843 was going on: when the disease was, for the first time, beginning to be regarded as distinct from typhus, and before sufficient evidence had been collected as to its contagious character. Yirchow's entire experience of the disease was acquired during a fortnight's visit to Silesia, during the epidemic of 1847, a period hardly sufficient for a thorough observation of the peculiarities of an unfamiliar disease. All the medical men practising in Silesia, how- ever, believed the disease to be contagious. Amongst Indian observers, not a few have denied or disbelieved in the contagiousness of relapsing fever, or, as it was formerly known, of jungle fever, remittent fever, or bilious remittent fever. Annesley probably did not meet with relapsing fever in any amount in Madras, the endemic disease of which metropolis was obviously typhoid fever. Hence his remark, that he had not himself observed the property of contagiousness in tropical fevers that came under his observatioi], was probably correct. He, however, expressed surprise at that peculiarity, and endeavoured to account for it, while he admitted that the fevers prevalent](https://iiif.wellcomecollection.org/image/b21987403_0223.jp2/full/800%2C/0/default.jpg)
