Observations on contagion / [Whitley Stokes].

  • Whitley Stokes
Date:
1818
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Observations on contagion / [Whitley Stokes]. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    by tlie timely vigilance of the magistrates, and submis¬ siveness of the people ; but that in large cities, where there were powerful persons who could not be compel¬ led to submit to the regulations, the mischief took its course. The authorised reports of the Physicians and Surgeons at - Marseilles, give strong positive proof of the infectious nature of the Plague. In one of these reports they unanimously declare, that when one person of a family was attacked by the Plague, and died, the rest soon received the disease, in so much that there were instances of entire fami¬ lies destroyed in that manner ; and if any one of an infected family fled to another house, the contagion accompanied him, and displayed itself in the family in which he had taken refuge. The first hospital opened for the infected at Marseilles proved fatal to all the attendants. The introduction of the plague into the Hotel-Dieu, in that city, was traced to a woman received as a patient from the very street where the plague first broke out. Twro of the nurses who assisted at her reception, and the matron who changed her linen, were taken sick next day, and died after a few hours illness : the contagion spreading from them, destroyed the physicians, surgeons and apothecaries, with all the other officers and servants of the house, the clergyman who attended the in¬ fected, and the whole of the patients in the Hospital. At the same city the beggars were seized by force, and employed to bury the dead, but were all soon con¬ sumed by so dangerous a labour ; they seldom sur¬ vived above two days, so that the magistrates were
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