Some account of the last yellow fever epidemic of British Guiana / by Daniel Blair, surgeon general of British Guiana ; edited by John Davy, inspector general of army hospitals, etc.

Blair, Daniel.

Date:: 1852

Credit: Some account of the last yellow fever epidemic of British Guiana / by Daniel Blair, surgeon general of British Guiana ; edited by John Davy, inspector general of army hospitals, etc. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by King’s College London. The original may be consulted at King’s College London.

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$Biscuit, and wheat flour . - - - 07^ lbs. Cheese - - - - - - 2^ lbs. Tea 1^ lbs. Cocoa and chocolate - - - - 5^ oz. As a rule, the sick diet requires to be high and generous. In the Colonial Hospital there is no mode of restraint or punishment for keeping disorderly patients in check but the threat of being put on spoon diet,* and it is found sufficient for discipline in almost all cases. But so severely is the privation of substantial food felt here, that the punishment is awarded by my own sentence only, and its continuance for even a few days requires the closest circumspection.f Substantiality in food is much craved. A few months ago, a negro, who had been admitted for fracture of the jaw, left the hospital in disgust on the second or third day for being confined to soft food. He had got, and consumed, among his day's provision of spoon diet, twenty- eight pints of arrow-root pap, with fifty-six ounces of sugar, and the due proportion of milk on the day before he left. The Portuguese immigrants detest pap4 In the above enumeration of articles of food consumed by the colonists, colFee and sugar are omitted, because the quantity cannot be ascertained with any precision. A large draught of coiFee, however, early in the morning, is drunk by every inhabitant of the colony, and the same frequently crowns the aliment of the whole day; 23^1bs. of refined sugar is the average annual consumption of each individual, but including Muscovado sugar, and sweets in the form of molasses and cane juice, probably there is an average of fifty pounds of sugar consumed by each individual annually in British Guiana. It is astonishing how soon all new settlers become accustomed to, and fond of, the peculiarities of the colony diet, in the statement of which the free use of peppers and bitter tonics is not to be omitted. In « pepper pot, fat pork, and the luscious flesh of the Labba, are consumed with a northern zest.§ * The spoon diet of the Colonial Hospital is the following: —Bread, 4oz.- tea, 1 oz.; sugar, 4 oz.; barley, 2 oz.; milk, 3 oz. ' ^ t [In our military hospitals no punishment of this kind is permitted, nor indeed any punishment, whilst a patient is under treatment.] — En. X [This feeling is in aocordanro with the low nutritive power of arrow- root, — a substance into the composition of which no aaotised matter «nters.] —Ed. § [The author informs me that the Labba is a small, and, as he believes, C 2$