The duration of the latent period, the fever, and the infectiveness of the exanthemata, and some allied diseases / by Francis Vacher.

  • Vacher, Francis, 1843-1914
Date:
1884
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: The duration of the latent period, the fever, and the infectiveness of the exanthemata, and some allied diseases / by Francis Vacher. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by The Royal College of Surgeons of England. The original may be consulted at The Royal College of Surgeons of England.

    19/22 page 17
    I enter up typhoid fever in my table as usually having 21 days from inception to the beginning of the eruption (range 1 to 28 days), out of which seven days are occupied with the stage of invasion (range 7 to 12 days). From the first appearance of the eruption to the cessation of the pyrexia I enter 21 days (range 14 to 23 days). Mumps.—The best evidence I can find of the incubation period of this disease is a note by Dr. Dukes, of Rugby, on the time from exposure to infection to the appearance of the characteristic symptoms of the disease in 37 cases. The range was from 14 to 25 days, and of the whole number 32 (80 per cent) showed a period of from 16 to 20 days, while in 18 (48 per cent) the period was 18 or 19 days. In Quain’s Dictionary the period is stated to be from eight days to three weeks. I do not remember any case where a period of less than a week is recorded. There seems to be ordinarily about three or four days of premonitory symptoms, though these amount to little mortf than general malaise, and some slight fever, and are often overlooked. The swelling in a typical case probably reaches its height in about four days, and in three days later the temperature is again normal. In the table I enter 18 days as the time from inception to the commence- ment of the swelling (range from 8 to 25 days), four days of which are taken up with premonitory symptoms ; and seven days as the time from the commencement of the swelling to the cessation of the fever. The patient may be considered as still infectious for two weeks after this. Having thus completed my tabular statement, I am in a position to submit that the diseases considered, as regards the period of incubation, naturally divide into three groups, as I have classed them. In the first group the normal time from inception to the beginning of the eruption is about a fortnight (in a large proportion of cases this time is observed with remarkable exactness), the range is less than in the other groups, and the premonitory symptoms occupy from one day to four days, seldom more. In the second group the normal time from inception to the beginning of the eruption is about five days, the range is from a few hours to a fortnight, and the premonitory symptoms occupy from one to two days, seldom more. In the' third group the normal time from inception to the beginning of the eruption is about three weeks, the range is wider than in the other groups, and the premonitory symptoms occupy from four days to a week. I regard this natural grouping of these diseases as most
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