On diphtheria : its history, progress, symptoms, treatment, and prevention / by Ernest Hart.

  • Hart, Ernest, 1835-1898.
Date:
1859
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: On diphtheria : its history, progress, symptoms, treatment, and prevention / by Ernest Hart. 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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    by a constitution naturally feeble and artificially effeminized, or whose vitality is lowered by the depressing influences of luxury, indolence, inactivity, and the habitual defiance of physical and hygienic laws, which is so frequent an element in fashionable life. Hence individual causes come into play, and introduce this associate of the poor into the palaces and mansions of the great, which they so often fringe. Diphtheria finds there its victims pale and anaemic, or grossly sanguineous and un- healthily excited. It strikes especially the lymphatic, and in some families, M. Bretonneau and Prof. Trousseau opine,— as in the Beauharnais family,—there is an element of heredi- tariness which invites the attack. This must certainly be accepted as no other than opinion. The military life has been said to predisp^e to it, since on several occasions, as in Tours and Avignon, epidemics have burst out amidst a legion, and proved fatal. The familiar defects of barracks in all sanitary and hygienic necessaries will sufficiently explain this predis- position. But the experience of the French epidemics has made abun- dantly clear one very important fact in the history of diph- theria, which has not yet been so clearly eliminated from the observed facts of the English epidemic. It may be very clearly shown from the evidence collected that contagion plays the principal part in the propagation of diphtheria. There is in this country a great deal of scepticism as to the contagious cha- racter of this disease; but the mass of evidence to prove it is over- whelming. Thus Bretonneau has collected some crucial cases. One is that of M. Herpin, surgeon to the hospital at Tours and professor at the schooL A child seized with diphtheria, who had transmitted the disease already to its nurse, was placed under his care: at one of his visits, by access of cough, part of the diphtheric matter jvas ejected from the mouth while the process of sponging the pharynx was being per- formed, and it lodged on the aperture of the nostril of M. Her- pin. Occupied with his task, he neglected for a moment to remove it. A severe diphtheric inflammation of the part en- 0 ‘'•r