A contribution to the knowledge of protection against infectious diseases / by Alfred Lingard ; communicated by E. Klein.
- Alfred Lingard
- Date:
- [1889]
Licence: Public Domain Mark
Credit: A contribution to the knowledge of protection against infectious diseases / by Alfred Lingard ; communicated by E. Klein. 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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![[From the Proceedings of the Royal Society, Vol. 45.] A Contribution to the Knowledge of Protection against Infectious Diseases. By Alfred Lingard, M.B., M.S. Durh., Diplomate in Public Health, Cambridge. Communicated by Dr. E. Klein, F.R.S. Received December 3, 1888. It has long been known, and it is now a well-established fact, that various eruptive fevers and blood diseases from which the mother may suffer, can be communicated to the foetus in utero. There is evidence also to prove that a disease may be transmitted to the foetus through a mother who is herself insusceptible to contagium, as in the case of a child having been born covered with small-pox eruption, the mother being quite free from it. The following are the diseases upon which the most important observations have been made :—Syphilis, small- pox, tuberculosis, anthrax, and relapsing fever. In the three latter the organisms producing these diseases have been found in the body of the foetus at birth, having passed through the placental vessels. In the present paper I wish to contribute to the other side of the question, viz., the relation existing between the foetus and its mother, or, in other words, the influence, if any, exerted by the foetus on the mother, when the foetus becomes the subject of an infectious disease con- tracted independently of the mother. All the comments made from this standpoint have, with the exception of one, been in relation to syphilis; the one being an instance communicated by Vidal, of a father attacked at the time of conception with small-pox, the foetus at six months being covered, during the whole of which period the mother remained healthy. With regard to syphilis, we are indebted to Colles for the first practical observation noted in 1887, when he cited as a curious fact, that he had never witnessed or even heard of an instance in which a child deriving the infection of syphilis from its parents, had caused an ulceration in the breast of the mother.](https://iiif.wellcomecollection.org/image/b22279866_0003.jp2/full/800%2C/0/default.jpg)
