Plague : how to recognise, prevent and treat plague / by James Cantlie.

  • Cantlie, James, Sir, 1851-1926.
Date:
1900
Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

Credit: Plague : how to recognise, prevent and treat plague / by James Cantlie. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by The Royal College of Surgeons of England. The original may be consulted at The Royal College of Surgeons of England.

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    21] on the power of the infeetivity of plague seem to be almost nil. Plague may occur in the hottest or in the coldest climates, and develop amongst hill residents and dwellers by the sea. Neither sex nor ar/e seems to avail, liace would appear to exercise a certain influence, but it is doubtful if to “ race ” ])er se is to be attributed the difference between the prevalence of the disease amongst the Europeans and the natives in Asia. The Malay race, curiously enough, seem wonderfully exempt from the disease. In Java, Sumatra, and the Malay Peninsula plague has not obtained a hold. This may be ascribable not to raxe, but to the fact that the equatorial belt has never been known to be deeply, if at all, affected by plague, and the nearer this belt is approached, so the virulence of plague seems to diminish. Plague was styled by Murchison’ “ the typhus of the tropics ”; but although it has crossed the “line,” it does not seem that the disease finds a favourable soil in the immediate neighbourhood of the equator. VARIETIES OF TYPE. The term “ bubonic ” is frequently used to designate true plague, but'buboes are by no means an essential sign of plague. In many outbreaks but few cases of a bubonic nature have been met with; so few, in fact, that enlargement of the glands proves the exception rather than the rule. Again, a succession of out- breaks in the same city seldom preserves the same t}q3e; pneu- monic symptoms prevailing in one, buboes in another, and yet again, a toxic or septiciemic- form in the third accession of the disease. So numerous are these divergent forms that the varieties of plague are grouped by several writers as follows :— (1) Bubonic plague.—Three-fourths of all plague cases belong to this type. As our experience increases, however, and closer attention is paid to “ collateral ” plague ailments, it will be found that many forms of complaint, in addition to the partially recog- ni.scd pneumonic and septic types, will prove to be plague. A mere enlargement of a gland does not constitute a bubo. En- larged glands are met with in the septic and septic-pneumonic types. It is the adenitis and the inflammation in the peri- glandular tissues that combine to form a bubo. Ihe bubonic form is generally stated to be the primary type of the attack, and that in subsequent recurrences a pneumonic type is more coimnonlv met with. The truth of this assertion must be