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.

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    nations; but where the evil has been neglected or overlooked, the effect is certain. No place or climate can be exempted from the punishment. Witness the Black Hole of Calcutta, where the survivors of that horrid night underwent the ordeal of putrid fever as soon as they were released.* Witness our own jails and prisons, where, in worse times than the present, the condition of the prisoners became so terrible that it was unsafe to bring them into court for trial; and witness, too, the hospitals of our fleets and armies, when, under the difficult circumstances of warfare, wholesome accommodations for their numerous inmates became too often a matter of impossibility. But the principle even goes further, and may be found existing amongst the lower animals, which, when cooped up in the close holds of ships in unfavourable weather, become actually infected with what may be called an epizootic typhous fever.*)- A11 this I know has been denied by other writers, more es¬ pecially by Dr Bancroft, whose philosophic inquiring mind was never to be satisfied with mere wrords; and it must be ac¬ knowledged with some apparent reason; for the generation of the typhoid poison has been never known to come from a hurried process, and would seem to proceed from a slower concoction than the sudden crowding together of a number of people, for a single night, could furnish. It is farther well known, that ty¬ phous fever can neither be carried into tropical climates, (for even the plague stops at the tropic of Cancer,) nor take root there. Governor Holwell, then, may have ignorantly asserted in his nar¬ rative that he was taken with putrid fever after his release; but the boils and critical abscesses with which he and his surviving companions were covered, show that some morbid poison must have been imbibed into the system ; for boils do not in any coun¬ try come as a result from violent perspiration, which in India and other hot climates produces the eruption, (and no other,) which goes by the name of prickly heat. Belying upon the re¬ spectable authority and pure character of the philanthropic Howard and other writers whom he quotes, he (Bancroft) has evidently been misled, when he affirms for a fact that natural¬ ized typhous fever does not exist in any other countries of Eu- * Vide Governor Holwell’s narration. 'I*-*' ■}* The term typhus fever may appear ridiculous as applied to the lower animals; but the author actually saw something very like it when a passenger on board of a transport that was employed to convey a cargo of sheep from the Island of Exuma, in the Bahamas, to Cape Nicholas Mole, St Domingo. The weather being line when the sheep were embarked, and the run expected to be short, a very great num. ber was put on board ; but the passage turned out tedious and stormy, with closed hatches, causing a great portion of the animals to die with black tongues, putrid mouths, and the blood in the larger vessels like the thin lees of port wine. The disease could scarcely have been scurvy, for there was plenty of fresh vegetable pro¬ visions ordered on board.