Notes and observations upon the contagion of typhous fever and contagion generally / by William Fergusson.

  • Fergusson, William.
Date:
1832
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Notes and observations upon the contagion of typhous fever and contagion generally / by William Fergusson. Source: Wellcome Collection.

    10/22 (page 10)
    stored, may be approached, however ill he may be, with perfect impunity. In this belief I feel warranted, from the knowledge of several important facts, of a character so general as to warrant the greatest confidence in their application. 1st, The Bristol H ospital, for a great many years, has received typhous fevers into their well-disciplined wards, without having ever spread the disease even to the most contiguous beds. 2d, Seve¬ ral of the great hospitals in London have followed the same example with the same results. 3d, The most pestilentially dangerous fevers to approach when single, in the confined dwellings of the poor, have almost everywhere been found de¬ void of every infectious principle when collected together in numbers, and confined by the hundred within the walls of a well-regulated fever hospital. Upon this point the question of contagion must turn; for, if the evidence here given be not im¬ pugned, it will be impossible in human testimony to adduce any™ thing more decisive and conclusive. Reasoning from single in¬ dividual instances will generally deceive; but well-digested im¬ partial observation upon masses of men can never lead to an er¬ roneous conclusion. * While I thus, however, express my conviction of typhous fever never being a true essential contagion under any type, I must allow the question to be in some degree open to discus¬ sion, in regard to that (type) form which has an animal origin, and may justly be called an animal poison. The evidence of the great hospitals just alluded to would imply a negative ; but it remains to be proved whether that belief may not have been founded upon the evidence of endemic typhus only, without experience of the other form of the disease. Thanks to our improved prison-discipline, such cases must now be rare. But when they existed in former times, the Black Assizes at Ox¬ ford, the Old Bailey Sessions, and other Sessions in Ireland and elsewhere, recorded in the different medical journals, would give fearful proof of its dreadful powers. I acknowledge, too, that the infection of hospital gangrene is a transportable and inoculable contagion, as applied to other ulcers, and that puer¬ peral fever, another local modification of typhus, may be carried from house to house in any locality. With regard to the jail fever above alluded to, however, my own belief leads me to the conclu¬ sion, that the contagion resided in the woollen clothing of the prisoners in the dock, from whence it is stated that a stream of * The author alludes here to what he witnessed, more especially at Liverpool, when on the staff of the north-west district, in the year U104. Typhous fever had, up to that time, proved a most virulent and dangerous contagion to the medical fa¬ culty visiting the poor in the lower part ot the town, who lived for the most part in cellars or other wretched dwellings : but on the building of an excellent Lever Hos¬ pital, its character there as a contagious disease altogether ceased.