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.

    12/22 (page 12)
    prisoner, in the same way that the inhabitant of the hill, in a swampy country, from breathing alternately the wholesome air of Heaven, with the noxious vapours from below, always retains it, and leads the superficial observer to the fallacious conclusion of dry rocky ground being more pestiferous than the bed of the fen itself. But how different is the true state of the case. The dweller in the locality below may, it is true, exhibit no acute disease; but every organ is disordered;—he has no health in any way, and is certainly destined to an early grave; while the other, although he may have imbibed the poison in its fullest dose, still possesses the power to throw it off, by an effort of his constitution, however dangerous and painful. He may, through such an ordeal, be restored to pristine health and vigour. With his benumbed neighbour, unless he removes from the marsh, it is impossible. He has been struck to the vitals, and must suc¬ cumb to his fate. This is not imaginary, nor am I speaking of what I have not seen and examined. In many of the malarious districts of Spain, old age, among the resident inhabitants, was unknown. On the marshy banks of the great Guiana rivers, and in the central districts of Trinidad, presenting as concentrated a body of swamp as any in the world, our soldiers died by hun¬ dreds, blighted and withered, without ever showing a paroxysm of fever; and it is even recorded by Dr Gregory of Edinburgh, in his lectures, that in a most unwholesome locality of the Southern United States of America, of which, at the distance of 40 years, I now forget the name, no native inhabitant con¬ stantly residing, ever attained the age of 21 years. I have been countenance, the lividity of the lips, and pearly whiteness of the eye ; and it is with surprise he finds on dissection that the abdominal viscera are seldom more than se¬ condarily affected, that the thorax is the principal seat of disease, where the heart is found to be enlarged, pale, flaccid, inelastic, covered with fat, and swimming in a pericardium filled with dropsical effusion. Under these circumstances, where the ill prepared arterial blood, deprived of its red particles, can communicate neither den¬ sity nor energy to the muscular fibre, though the miserable sufferers may often live a long time, they are unfit, even in the early stages of their illness, to make any active exertion, The first time I saw the West India rangers march in quick time round the garrison parade of Barbadoes, where they had been called, after a long residence in Trinidad, to accompany the expedition against Guadaloupe, they stag¬ gered, dropt, and fell by dozens out of the ranks, like men under a murderous fire of musketry. Fifty of them were on the ground before they had made a single round, (little more than a mile,) whose quivering lips, and ghastly looks, and hurried breathing, presented a striking image of the mortally wounded.” An in¬ spection was immediately ordered, and a large proportion of the men was left be¬ hind ; but the remainder, when they came to land in Guadaloupe, were found to be quite unfit, as a corps, for their own light service of the woods and mountains, so generally were they affected in the manner just described. My friend Dr M‘Cabe, now of Cheltenham, then surgeon of the York rangers at St Joseph’s, upon the great eastern marsh Trinidad, who was most indefatigable in his researches and dissections, I consider to be better qualified, from the opportunities he then enjoyed, than any other observer, to give useful information upon this mysterious manifestation of the marsh poison.