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
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

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.

    94/290 (page 72)
    Then interval. 5tli, 6tli, and 7th of March, muscular pains recommence; the formative stage.—Disease developed on the 8tli, which ends in black vomit, yellow eye, and death, on 12th March, 11 a.m. Thus the treatment of a scald, two baffled attacks, and one developed and fatal one, occupy the forty-one days. When it thus became a parasitic disease, the symptoms, of course, were considerably modified at first, but the epidemic disease ultimately absorbed all the other symptoms. The invasion sometimes commenced with malaise of several days' duration. Sometimes the formative stage showed itself in diarrhoea; in a few cases it commenced with apoplectic or para- lytic symptoms. Sometimes, if the treatment were early adopted, or the patient was suffering from another malady, reverberations, repulse, and relapse, Avere observed in the first stage, thus abnormally extending its period. About one-half of the normal cases were so sudden and pronounced in the seizure, that the exact hour of attack could be precisely ascertained. And thus, as the following Table, will clearly show, the hours of six a.m. and six p. m., when, in our latitude, the most violent of atmospheric disturbance of the day occurs, were most favourable to the seizure.* [For Table, see next page.] • [It may be worthy of remark, that at the time of sunrise, — the coolest period of the twenty-four hours, when, according to the observations of the Author, a large proportion of attacks commence, — the temperature of the body is lowest. This is the residt of a series of trials conducted on my own person consecutively for nearly three years, in the West Indies; at the same time the pulse was commonly slowest. This condition of the system might favour an attack.]—Ep.