An epitome of the reports of the medical officers to the Chinese imperial maritime customs service, from 1871 to 1882 : with chapters on the history of medicine in China; materia medica; epidemics; famine; ethnology; and chronology in relation to medicine and public health / compiled and arranged by C.A. Gordon.

Date:
1884
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: An epitome of the reports of the medical officers to the Chinese imperial maritime customs service, from 1871 to 1882 : with chapters on the history of medicine in China; materia medica; epidemics; famine; ethnology; and chronology in relation to medicine and public health / compiled and arranged by C.A. Gordon. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    only reigned four times epidemically, namely, in the years 1507, 1582, 1610, and 1681. At Seville it occurs at centenary periods. According to a chronological record given in the same woi*k, from the year B.C. 512 until a.d. 1849, an epidemic pestilence has visited the world at regular intervals, varying from seventeen to twenty years. Dr. Wight wrote, under date 1682, that, 'one time with another, a plague has happened in London once in twenty yearsalso, that up to that date, ' the plagues of London kill one-fifth part of the inhabitants.'' Another subject closely connected with the periodicity of epidemic constitution is, the uniform increase of seizures and deaths. We see in the first week (of an epidemic of plague) a small number seized; nest week a greater; it so continues to increase, acquiring a maximum of extent and fatality, and then decreases nearly in the same ratio in which the increase had taken place. Another proposition is, that ' The simultaneous appearance of epidemic disease in several parts of the earth's surface, its continuous and progressive march in a somewhat straightforward direction, show that it owes its origin to cosmical, and not to local causes.' Another, that c The simultaneous appearance of epidemic and epizootic diseases, referred to by authors on the subject of epidemic diseases, also proves the existence of some great cosmical cause, as distinguished from the more ordinary sources of disease—namely, contagion, malaria, the influence of heat and cold, and all such causes of disease.' Also, that ' Each country has its own peculiar, typical, and invariable epidemics.' ' Cholera always follows the great lines of human intercourse. It usually breaks through all obstacles to its progress, whether natural or artificial, such as mountains, seas, rivers, cordons, quarantines, lazarettos, and all such impediments. In short, epidemics travel from a south-east to a north-west point of the compass. [This, no doubt, applies very generally; but the rule has some very notable exceptions.] Epidemics also admit of classification among themselves. Thus, in England, there are the exotic, comprising such diseases as plague and cholera ; the indigenous, such as ague and scurvy; and the naturalized, such as small-pox and scarlet fever.'—(Guy on ' Public Health,' p. 37.) And a similar division is applicable in the case of other countries. The further remarks on the subject of pestilences by Dr. Bascome (p. 184 et seq.) are no less important. ' We see disease assail and carry off mankind at all times, and in all regions; mur- rain is destructive of dumb animals, blight spares not the vegetable kingdom ; in fine, all nature is subjected, in various degrees, to the devastating tendency of the elements in their general evolutions in the mundane economy, based on immutable laws. The records of antiquity show that all kinds of pestilence, including febrile diseases, have been known under various appellations from the earliest ages of the world; the same character of diseases, arising from like causes> occurring during similar seasons, happening in similar localities, and marked pretty generally by the same circumstances. The comparatively modern origin of some diseases may be said to rest on the absence or deficiency of distinct and express notice of them in the writings of the ancients, arising in some measure from false or imperfect translations from the original, and from the practice of the ancients in referring different malignant maladies to the same pestilential constitu- tion. With reference to modern nomenclature, we now hear pestilence called plague in Egypt, yellow fever in America and elsewhere, bilious remittent and intermittent and also yellow fever in the West In dies, and typhus or nervous fever (at the present time typhoid?) in Great Britain. The phenomena of epidemic pestilences or diseases are various and dissimilar, observing no regular course of succession, but commencing and ceasing at periods influenced by certain changes of the seasons, and modified by various circumstances, especially such as locality and habit of the body. During certain periods or seasons, elemental disturbance has enveloped, as it were, the entire globe, carrying death and misery into every quarter; epidemic pestilences or diseases are con- sequently assignable to natural causes, without searching for or hunting after mysterious agencies,