Some account of the last yellow fever epidemic of British Guiana / Ed. by John Davy.

  • Blair, Daniel.
Date:
1850
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Some account of the last yellow fever epidemic of British Guiana / Ed. by John Davy. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine Library & Archives Service. The original may be consulted at London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine Library & Archives Service.

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    perceive how the assertion can be borne out, that the visit of this soldier to an infected vessel brought the disease into the barracks. The ' Growler' was not placed in quarantine ; constant commu- nication to and from Bridgetown was kept up for eight days, during which time the vessel remained at anchor and received coals from the town, the inhabitants of which, at that time, during the whole course of the epidemic, and at present, continue remarkably healthy.* * [In the same letter, which bears the date of Barbados, November 30tb, 1849, it is stated that yellow fever had broken out in the 54th regiment stationed in Antigua, in barracks on Shirley Heigiits, without mention of any suspicion of the disease.having been introduced db externa; that up to the 25th of that month, out of seventy-two cases attacked, twenty-eight men and three women had died; that out of twenty-six cases treated by mercury and bleeding the deaths had been thirteen; and out of thirty-six treated by quinine and calomel the deaths had been eleven. In a letter from Dr. Blair, dated Georgetown, Demerara, December 3, 1849, in reply to an inquiry I made respecting the discoloration of the skin in yellow fever, he observes,— In regard to the colour in yellow fever, I recollect one experiment only which I made on the subject, and I know of no other that has been made. In a case of recovery in the Seaman's Hospital from an almost fatal attack of well marked yellow fever, a great many vesicles, or small bullae, appeared over the body and limbs, containing a thin clear fluid of a similar yellow colour to that of the skin. I collected the fluid of several of these, and the colour became green on the addition of dilute nitric acid. Previous to this I had been rather inclined towards the belief that the yellow discoloration arose from an altered condition of the blood, such as is perceived when an ecchymosis (a black eye for instance) is in progress of absorption. But this idea was an unsupported hypothesis. The above observation and example given by the author hardly needs comment, it seems so conclusive in proof of the discoloration being owing to the colouring matter of the bile being retained in the blood, and by the blood imparted to the skin and other parts in which the discoloration appears, in accordance with the conjecture hazarded in page 158.] —Ed. THE END.