The aerial convection of small-pox from hospitals / by John C. McVail.

  • John McVail
Date:
1894
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: The aerial convection of small-pox from hospitals / by John C. McVail. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine Library & Archives Service. The original may be consulted at London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine Library & Archives Service.

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    ton side was a shipyard, and ten or a dozen carpenters at work, all liable to the disease. They all took the suiall-pox excepting two, and the eruptions appeared at the usual time from that day. We have the clearest proof of the small-pox being coui- numicated to the distance of several hundred roods, viz., from the hospital at West Boston to several families in the neighbourhood. The atmosphere was for many days loaded with aqueous vapours, and the little motion it had was towards the houses where the small-pox made its appear- ance. The guard (for the hospital was military) which was continually kept prevented all communication. In a ■subsequent letter, Waterhouse states as to the cases which produced the cross-river infection, that the dissemination occurred when several houses were highly infected. As to the exact distance,he adds that, since he had first written to Haygarth, a bridge had been built across the river, and the previous statement confirmed by measurement. It would, therefore, appear that there was no bridge when the infection was alleged to have occurred. In trying to recon- cile Haygarth's facts and opinions with his own, Watei'house argues for the variability of small-pox infectivity. In America he had observed the difference in the virulency of small-pox observed at the different periods when epidemic here, and he urged that there may be differences in climatic conditions, differences in the atmosphere, and differences in individual susceptibility as between one time and another, and one nation and another. In Haygarth's replj'- he tells Waterhouse that it was only the New England dread of small-pox that made them hurry patients away to pest-houses, and that in this way they were prevented from ascertaining the truth of the view that small-pox could not be aerially conveyed from one room to another in the same house; that they had plenty of fogs in England, but no record of their spreading small-pox ; and as to the disease being carried six miles by means of a wig (as had been alleged by Waterhouse), lie mamtains^ that, according to no known chemical principle, could a wig attract miasms from the air and again restore them to it; and that if, indeed, a wig kept on giving forth small-pox virus for six miles it was capable of infecting 15,840 persons standing two feet apart in a line six mile's long. Similarly, as to the cross-river case, if small-pox coidd be aerially carried for 1,500 feet, then in England every person susceptible of the distemper icould (the italics are mine) inevitably be attacked in a few weekis. B 2
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