Quarantine and the plague : being a summary of the report on these subjects recently addressed to the Royal Academy of Medicine in France, with introductory observations, extracts from Parliamentary correspondence, and notes / by Gavin Milroy.

  • Milroy, Gavin, 1805-1886.
Date:
1846
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Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Quarantine and the plague : being a summary of the report on these subjects recently addressed to the Royal Academy of Medicine in France, with introductory observations, extracts from Parliamentary correspondence, and notes / by Gavin Milroy. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by Royal College of Physicians, London. The original may be consulted at Royal College of Physicians, London.

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    In the fourth and last part, the question as to the ordinary or exceptional duration of the incubation of the plague is discussed. The general con- clusions of the Report, and the application of these conclusions to the im- portant subject of Quarantine are appended to this part. First Part. Chap. I.—What is the country, or what are the countries, where the Plague has been observed to arise spontaneously ? In attempting to trace back the history of the plague, with the view of throwing some light upon this question, it would be little profitable to carry our researches beyond the sixth century of the Christian sera, as there is too good reason to believe that the terms Xoiy.o<; and pestis were previously used in a generic sense, to denote all epidemic diseases which caused great mortality. The boils breaking forth with blains upon man and beast,” recorded by Moses, need scarcely be alluded to. The famous plague of Athens, so graphically described by Thucydides, is supposed by the best authorities to have been a malignant form of typhus, complicated with a peculiar eruption and with gangrenous eschars. The Greek historian says that it was believed in his day that the pestilence had been imported from Egypt into the Piraeus. Whether we are to admit the genuineness of the passage from Rufus of Ephesus, a celebrated physician in the time of Trajan—discovered by Car- dinal Angelo Mai at Rome, in 1831, in the writings of Oribasius, who lived in the time of the Emperor Julian—is doubted by some learned en- quirers ; by M. Pariset, the accomplished secretary of the Academy, among the number. The passage indeed contains a remarkably accurate descrip- tion of the characteristic symptoms of the plague,* and the writer refers to epidemics of the disease in Egypt, Syria, and Libya, mentioned by Dios- corides, Posidonius, and Dionysius, who (are supposed to have) lived two or three centuries before the Christian sera. It may be worthy of notice here that the writings of Cicero, Strabo, and Pliny afford evidence that Egypt was regarded, in their time, as a country that was fertile in the plague. There are allusions too in the works of Galen and Aretseus, not to mention Hippocrates, that would seem to indicate their acquaintance with malignant fevers accompanied with bubos and carbuncles. But, without dwelling longer on the uncertain history of the plague, we shall at once come down to the year 542 of the Christian sera, when that terrible epidemic, the description of which by Procopius and Evagrius can leave no doubt as to the true nature of the disease, ravaged the city of Constantinople. From this period, the appellation has been very gene- rally restricted to that form of fever which is accompanied with bubos. * The following is one of several paragraphs that might be quoted :— <e A pestilential carbuncle is that which is accompanied with a severe inflam- mation, with acute pain, and delirium. In many of those who are affected with it, there occur also hard and painful bubos, and the patients soon die of these carbuncles. This is the case more especially with those who live in the neigh- bourhood of marshes.”
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