On the study of epidemic disease as illustrated by the pestilences of London : being a paper read before the Epidemiological Society of London at the opening of the session 1857-8 / by E. Headlam Greenhow.

  • Greenhow, Edward Headlam, 1814-1888.
Date:
1858
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: On the study of epidemic disease as illustrated by the pestilences of London : being a paper read before the Epidemiological Society of London at the opening of the session 1857-8 / by E. Headlam Greenhow. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    22 a different nature from that which produces cholera. How¬ ever generated, the poison of plague or of cholera may require a peculiar crasis of the human subject; and this crasis, depending upon conditions participated in by large numbers of the population, may form a necessary predisposition for the disease. But I profess not to solve questions which can only be set at rest by much patient research and observation. The chief conclusions that appear to be deducible from the facts here put together are, that of the several forms of epidemic diseases which have at different periods visited London, influenza has maintained its precise character from century to century, because it is independent of the extrinsic conditions of the population it attacks. On the other hand, black death, sweating sickness, plague, and epidemic cholera —whether in the seventeenth or nineteenth centuries—have appeared in succession and then disappeared, because they have required for their development some definite but tem¬ porary condition, either of their human subjects or of their places of abode. If a return to the ruder civilisation and habits of the fourteenth century were possible, London might again become liable to black death, which exists even in our own day in some remote provinces of Asia under the name of the Pali plague.* A return to the habits and diet of the sixteenth century might reproduce the per¬ sonal crasis, which would lead to the outbreak of malignant rheumatic fever in the form called sweating sickness, which, however, was not altogether uninfluenced by surrounding cir¬ cumstances. “ Noxious exhalations from dung-pits, stagnant waters, swamps, impure canals, and the odour of foul rushes, which were in general use in the dwellings in England, together with all kinds of offensive rubbish, seemed not a little to con¬ tribute to it; and it was remarked universally, that wherever such offensive odours prevailed, the sweating sickness appeared more malignant.”} The Roettingen sweating sickness of the early part of the present century, which coincided exactly in character with the sweating sickness of the fifteenth and six¬ teenth centuries, seems to attest the possibility of such an event.} A return to the dirty habits and unwholesome cus¬ toms of our ancestors would almost certainly lead to the re¬ currence of plague, which still exists in places that in these respects bear some analogy, however faint, to London before * For this fact I am indebted to a very interesting paper, written for the Epidemiological Society of London, by Dr. Hirsch, of Dantzic, and read at one of the meetings several years since. + Hecker’s Epidemics of the Middle Ages, p. 292. \ Ibid., p. 825.