On preservation of health in India / by Sir Joseph Fayrer.

  • Joseph Fayrer
Date:
1880
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: On preservation of health in India / by Sir Joseph Fayrer. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    '1' 24 water lies near the surface, such as the Himalayan Terai (I wish I had time to tell you more about it), are often deadly and uninhabitable for a great part of the year ; the worst season everywhere being in the drying up months, when heat is dessicating the ground, and liberating malaria. Dry arid tracts of land are not exempt, for it is bad enough in many districts where it cannot be attri- buted to surface moisture—but it may be that subsoil ■damp is the cause. I may say, in passing, that there is no more fertile source of disease than subsoil water and im- perfect drainage. It would appear that cultivation and living on the ground will in time improve its salubrity, but beware of newly-disturbed ground, or of clearance of vege- tation, for there emanations may arise, from which the most pernicious malarial fever may result. You have an example of the consequences of bad surface drainage, im- proper distribution, or retention of water, in the fever that has been for years depopulating a district (Burdwan) in Bengal. There is a grand field for engineering skill and science in the sanitary arrangements of India, and I commend it to your consideration. Malarial miasmata are influenced by locality, winds, heat, &c. One is more liable to suffer on the leeside of a swamp, for example, than to windward of it. A belt of trees intervening will protect to a certain extent, and a covering of the slightest gauze, such as a musquito curtain, will guard the sleeper at night. It is more potent near the ground than at an elevation, hence you should always sleep in an upper storey, or in a bed well raised from the ground, if you can get one. People con- stantly exposed to malaria become to a certain extent inured to it; but ague or fever are not the only modes in which malaria declares its action. Broken health, anaemia, cachexia, enlarged spleen, neuralgia, are even more frequent results, and it often happens that persons may be driven away by ill health from malarious districts who have never had fever, though they may have suffered severely in other ways. Such persons not unfrequently get fever after they leave the district and return to Europe. In cases of malarious anaemia, with enlarged spleen,—a common result of fever,—
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