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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    rope than those of the British isles, and that it only visits the former as a transient imported disease from the latter. The strongest negative evidence to the contrary of this has been furnished by every European army in the field during the late war, and will be furnished hereafter, so long as armies pur¬ sue the operations of war, according to the system of Napo¬ leon, during the winter season, instead of going into winter quarters. In the colder countries of Europe this was to have been expected; but Portugal and Spain, after their summers were past, were even more prolific of the typhoid contagion if pos¬ sible than Germany and Russia. From this cause the Spanish army of the Marquis Romana, when it crossed ours in Gallicia on the retreat to Corunna, was in a state of pestilence,—a moving cloud of the disease. The Portuguese Depositos, as they were called, (district prisons for the conscripts,) managed by villan- ous native commissaries, who robbed the recruits in every way of their food, clothing, and supplies, were destroying the army from this cause far faster than it could have been recruited, un¬ til they were placed under the direction of British officers ; and the people of the country, when driven from their homes and penned within the lines of Lisbon during the winter of 1811, were cut off* in thousands by the disease. To say that these were not typhous fevers would be ridiculous. They were abso¬ lute caricatures of the disease in all its features,—not to be matched, I am convinced, in the worst times of Ireland. The Spaniards could not receive the infection from the British, for with us they never amalgamated; and their armies, remote from our line in the winter seasons, were paralyzed from the same cause as Romana’s ; but we got it from them whenever obliged to fol¬ low in their course, and take up their infected cantonments. Nor did we-get it, nor even take it, from the miserable popula¬ tion inclosed within our works near Lisbon ;—the winter diseases of the well-fed, well-lodged troops, being those of the season and field operations alone, not typhous fevers,* I acknowledge that there may, indeed must, be a peculiar ap¬ titude in the moist soil and climate of the British isles for the generation and nurture of the typhoid poison ; but this property of generating the typhoid principle is not exclusively peculiar to the insular soil. On the contrary, it is common to the human race whenever the circumstances here denoted can be brought into full operation and combination; and even the high temperature and dry atmosphere of the tropics, however soon and certainly it may * I can speak to these points with the more confidence, from having held the si¬ tuation at the time both of Inspector-General of Hospitals to the Portuguese army, and that of a member of the Junta that sat at Lisbon for the succour of the distres¬ sed population.