Epidemiology, or, The remote cause of epidemic diseases in the animal and in the vegetable creation ... Part 1 / by John Parkin.

  • Parkin John, 1801-1886.
Date:
1873
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Epidemiology, or, The remote cause of epidemic diseases in the animal and in the vegetable creation ... Part 1 / by John Parkin. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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

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    stated, at best, as only an inferior evil to plague itself.” * Whether diseases be contagious or not, it is better to stand, shoulder to shoulder as soldiers do, and meet death like men, not like cowards and poltroons. It is, besides, politic; if we forsake our fellows to-day, they will, of •course} forsake us to-morrow, and we may perish by a sort of retributive justice. These evils are not confined to individuals: communi- ties suffer in the same way, and from the same cause. When a disease is confined to a particular city, as fre- quently happens, all communication with the surrounding country is, of course, interrupted. Provisions, therefore, are liable to run short, and, when this is the case, the ravages of the epidemic are invariably increased, the want of food being a most powerful predisposing cause of disease. No less powerful will be the mental depression produced with persons thus shut up in a town, and doomed, as it were, to certain death. Gafrandi, who has given a history of the plague which prevailed at Digne, in Provence, in 1629,j states, that the ravages of the disease were such that, in the space of a few months, only 1,500 inhabitants were left out of 10,000. He attributed this great mortality to the strict quarantine in which the inhabitants were placed, so that no one could pass the boundary line and retire into the country. Again; on the outbreak of the plague at Mar- seilles, in 1720, an Act of the Parliament of Aix, con- firmed by the Council of State, prohibited, under pain of death, the inhabitants of Marseilles and of the suburbs from leaving the town. Hence, as we are told, a great amount of misery, and a mortality truly frightful. * Despatch addressed to Lord Bathurst, in 1819, on the plague at Malta. ■\ Notitia eccles. Diniensis.
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