Illustrations of the atmospherical origin of epidemic diseases, and of its relation to their predisponent constitutional causes : and on the twofold means of prevention, mitigation, and cure, and of the powerful influence of change of air as a prinicpal remedy / by T. Forster.

  • Forster, T. (Thomas), 1789-1860.
Date:
1829
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Illustrations of the atmospherical origin of epidemic diseases, and of its relation to their predisponent constitutional causes : and on the twofold means of prevention, mitigation, and cure, and of the powerful influence of change of air as a prinicpal remedy / by T. Forster. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by The University of Glasgow Library. The original may be consulted at The University of Glasgow Library.

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    fever the countertype of the pestilence of Gibraltar. History furnishes many similar instances. Mr. Webster, an American writer of some years ago^ seems, in his history of epidemics, to have collected many very curious particulars of this sort, but they are hastily put together, and want order. I have but just seen the book, and have had too superficial a perusal of some of its contents to make much use of them. The necessity of a sufficient predisponent cause for the production of actual disease, when a pestilential stimulant is abroad, in other words, the curious failure of the specific epidemical poison to act on endemical peculiarities of constitution, has often been illustrated by the choice of nations, which Febris has selected for her victims in places where men of all countries have been assembled together. Cardanus says of the plague of Basle, that the Swiss were affected, while the Italians, Germans, and French escaped. In the plague' of Denmark, the English, Dutch, and Germans were, for the most part, untouched. When the sweating sickness first broke out in London, it affected the English alone ; although the same disorder has, at a subse- quent period, appeared in other countries. In the desolating pestilence of the American Indians in 1618, the Europeans present escaped. Sometimes the plague will single out particular families, as once happened at Nimuegen, in Holland. The fever at Universities at times has affected only the students. And at Altdorp, in Franconia, a case of this sort of selection is related of so extraordinary a nature that I should be afraid to relate it, authenticated as it is by Van Sweeten and by Heister. Similar selections have happened among domestic animals in cases of epizootics : the best fed have suffered most; and in plants, when epibotanic pestilence has prevailed, the garden specimens have died, while hardy wild plants have escaped. Sometimes an epidemic in one country will have