James Lind and scurvy / [Ralph Stockman].

  • Stockman, Ralph, 1861-1946.
Date:
[1926]
Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

Credit: James Lind and scurvy / [Ralph Stockman]. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    vermin he advises thorough washing with the aid of the ship’s fire-engine and afterwards with vinegar, exposure of hammocks and bedding to the full breeze, burning of body clothes, and fumigation with sulphur, charcoal, arsenic, and gunpowder, mixed with oakum dipped in tar. The drinking- water was often putrid, and he suggests its purification by filtration through casks of sand, or by charcoal. For the sick-berth he insists on the necessity of strict cleanliness, free ventilation, disinfection of all discharges, linen, and bedding, plenty of air-space, and a convalescent room, things which are a commonplace to-day but were not so then. The surgeons are advised to wear special clothes when on duty (waxed linen being recommended), to wash their hands frequently and not to use sponges, somewhat similar precautions being enjoined on the attendants. Typhus and typhoid were then very prevalent in the navy at times. In tropical fevers he warns against Sydenham’s practice of bleeding as “ by no means applicable to the fevers which attack Europeans in Guinea,” on the grounds that the experience on which such advice was based had been obtained solely in London from inflammatory fevers, and not from dysentery and malaria. Tertian and quartan agues were very common in England in Lind’s time, and serious and deadly malaria on foreign naval stations. His advice regarding prophylaxis both at home and abroad is very full, and in view of recent developments in our knowledge and practice extremely interesting. People on shore are advised by him to live in a house well up on a hill¬ side, with no stagnant water about it and with no doors or windows facing a marsh, to sleep in the highest rooms and to use smoke fires in them, to avoid being out at night and to shun marshy places at all times. Ships’ crews, if compelled to remain ashore overnight, are directed to retire to a close hut and keep up a constant fire, or in default of this to render the room smoky with gunpowder or tobacco, “ as fire and smoke afford the most excellent defence against the noxious and dangerous qualities of the night air.” Wood-cutting and all kinds of labouring work on shore should be performed by hired natives and not by sailors, who should be engaged as little as possible in river-work or any duty which takes them over swampy ground. The ship should be moored well off the coast and all the crew brought aboard at night. Lastly, he says cinchona bark is the only medicine of any real value, the
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