Typho-malarial fever : is it a special type of fever? : being remarks introductory to the discussion of the question in the Section of Medicine, International Medical Congress / by J.J. Woodward.

Joseph Janvier Woodward

Date:: 1876

Credit: Typho-malarial fever : is it a special type of fever? : being remarks introductory to the discussion of the question in the Section of Medicine, International Medical Congress / by J.J. Woodward. 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.

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$Next let me ask your attention to the story of the celebrated Hunga- i-iau fever, which for at least three centuries played so formidable a part in the campaigns undertaken by the House of Austria against the Turks The valleys of the Danube and its tributaries are still the home of agues, remittent and continued malarial fevers, big spleens, and ma- larial cachexias. Lying further to the north than our own Mississippi valley, the climate is nevertheless such that the marshy borders of the streams and pools give rise to a malaria scarcely less intense than that with which we are familiar in the lower Mississippi. I may refer you to the papers of Muller, Wenmaring, and Lantz* for graphic descrip- tions of the characteristics of the country and of its prevailing diseases in our own day. Now, in every considerable campaign against the Turks, in which the armies of the German Emperors invaded the Hungarian plains, from the beginning of the sixteenth century to the end of the eighteenth, a form of fever prevailed among the troops so unlike the ordinary European fevers that it has always been known as the Hungarian fever, and so fatal as to occasion the proverb that “ Hungary is the grave of the Ger- mans.” This Hungarian fever has exercised some of the best medical minds of the last thi’ee centuries. It is now generally admitted to have been a hybrid between the endemic remittent fevers of the Hungarian soil and spotted typhus. The attention of civilized Europe was first directed to it when, after the luckless Hungarian campaign of Maximil- ian n. in 1566, his pest-stricken soldiers returned to their homes. They scattered the contagion of spotted typhus throughout Germany on their way. The disease bred by that contagion was also called the Hungarian fever, but it was simply spotted typhus, and the student of the voluminous older literature of the Hungarian fever finds no little confusion growing out of this circumstance, and no little difference be- tween the descriptions of such eye-witnesses as Thomas Jordan and Tobias Cober, who described the Hungai’ian fever as they saw it on Hungarian soil, and the descriptions of those who merely observed the spread of spotted typlnis in the German towns, and gave it the name of the Hungarian fever because the contagion had been spread by soldiers returning from Hungary. The army of Maximilian, however, was not the first German army * Jos. MCi.lrr. Die k, k. Mtlilaergrnenzf, mil bcsonderer Bcrucksichtigung tier vcrcinigten Carl- tloHler, Banal and li^nratdiner Graenr.e. Med. Jahrb. dcs k. k. ocst. Slaatcs. lid 35, (i8.f3,) S. 89, 131,361. Bd. 36, I1843,) S. no, 2J5, 338. K. I,ANT/,. Phys. Med. Bcschreibung dcr Barangaer Ges- pannscha/l in Ungarn. ISame Journal.) Bd. 55, (1846,) S. 98,231,361. Bd. 56, (184O,) S. 99, 221. 349. B. Wf;N.\lAKiNf,, Ueber die Sump/wcchsel/teber, (Same Joiinial.) Bd. 57, (1846,)S. 11, 129. Considt, also, J. .M, Mindekkk. Dai Ilalbdreitagige Fiebcr, (Ileinitritmiis,) in den Sudlichen Provinzen de.i Uutiisrhen Keichs. Miirelatid'.s Journal, Bd. 28, st. 2. (1809,) S. 1. .MOi.i.ijn, cite<l above, speaks of ibis fever as the !leinilriheui Dacite. ()]>. tit., Bd. 36, S. 343,$