Report on yellow fever / by James Gillkrest.

  • Gillkrest, J. (James), -1853.
Date:
1852
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Report on yellow fever / by James Gillkrest. 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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    J54 Italy, Sicily, and East Indies. With respect to Gibraltar, therefore, these facts may be considered sufficient to establish that, previous to the Yellow- Fever epidemic of 1804, the disease had made its appearance there to a formidable extent: indeed, it is well known that, along that part of the Spanish coast, no other form of epidemic proves so fatal. It may be added, that Dr. Monro says in his work on the diseases of armies, that in 1799 a fever made its appearance at Gibraltar, which he considered similar to that of the West Indies. It is probable that the existence of the causes of Yellow Fever have not been confined to the localities in Spain re- corded as having been visited by the disease; those causes may equally have been present, at numberless other places, though not recognised, in consequence of such places being uninhabited. We cannot always be sure of the existence of ague localities until the presence of inhabitants establish this. Respecting Yellow-Fever epidemics in other parts of Europe, that described by Palloni, Tomassini, and others, as having taken place at Leghorn in 1804, is the most remarkable. We have an account, by a Dr. Kennedy, of an epidemic at Lifibon in 1736 ; and, from the symptoms, there seems little reason to doubt of the identity of the disease with Yellow Fever. Pro- fessor Salva, of Barcelona, considers a fever with yellow skin which prevailed very extensively in a district of the Canton of Berne, during a period of very extraordinary heat, in the year 1762, and of which there is some account in a volume of the proceedings of the French Academy of Sciences for 1763, as similar to the Yellow Fever of Spain. Some recognise this disease also in the fever with yellow skin, haemorrhages, &c., described by Frank as occurring in Hungary. The existence of this fever occasionally at points higher up the Mediterranean than those already mentioned, rests upon respectable authority. The late Dr. Alexander, surgeon to H. M. forces, who had ample experience of Yellow Fever in the West Indies, declared to me on a particular occasion, that he witnessed many deaths from the disease in Sicily, soon after the return of Sir John Stewart’s army from Lower Calabria in 1806; and that while at this latter place, some cases occurred among our troops. The existence of sporadic or scattered cases of Yellow Fever with black vomit even in England and France, has been insisted upon by some person^; those referred to in the Dictionnaire de Midicine, vol. xxi. p. 1/, as having occurred at Paris in the hot summer of 1822, seem most worthy of attention. Aa c -l In turning to East India Records, the mention at p. 4b or the Bengal reports on cholera, of a fever with yellow skin which occurred in that presidency in 1816, can hardly be held as conclusive. But we find, in a memoir by Mr. Walsh, ol the