The common nature of epidemics, and their relation to climate and civilization, also remarks on contagion and quarantine : from writings and official reports / by Southwood Smith ; ed. by T. Baker.

  • Thomas Southwood Smith
Date:
1866
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: The common nature of epidemics, and their relation to climate and civilization, also remarks on contagion and quarantine : from writings and official reports / by Southwood Smith ; ed. by T. Baker. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by the Francis A. Countway Library of Medicine, through the Medical Heritage Library. The original may be consulted at the Francis A. Countway Library of Medicine, Harvard Medical School.

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    tuiy downwards^ sliows tliat wlienever a new Plague was at liand^ destined to become truly European^ it was preceded by a sudden outbreak of Influenza^ as general as it was violent. This is exemplified with singular uniform- ity in the Epidemics of the 16th century—the severest epidemic period on record. It is most remarkable that in our own day the first visitation of Epidemic Cholera was preceded by an outbreak of Influenza which resembled^ in the most minute particulars^ the violent and universal Influenza that ushered in the mortal Sweating Sickness Epidemic of 1517. So again^ on the second visitation of Cholera^ in 1848^ it was preceded, as we have just seen_, by the universal Influenza of 1847.* The second circumstance, and a most instructive one it is, •premonitory of the advent of a great Epidemic, is a general transformation of the type of ordinary diseases into the characteristic type of the approaching pestilence. Sydenham gives a graphic description of such a trans- formation in the character of the fevers and inflammatory diseases prevailing in London some months before the outbreak of the Great Plague. He states that this change consisted in an approximation, in several striking features, of the general type of disease, to the distinguishing cha- racters of the Pestilence which had not yet appeared, but was close at hand. In 1831, in the wards of the London Fever Hospital, I observed and recorded a precisely similar change in the general type of the fevers in London, six months before the first visitation of Cholera. Anterior to that period, fever in London, for a long series of years, had been es- sentially an acute, inflammatory disease, for which blood- * It may be remarked that for some time prior to the Cattle Plague in the autumn of 1865, the disease called pIeuro-2meiimonia had extensively prevailed among the herds throughout the country. [Ed.]