The cause, prevention, and treatment of the cattle plague / by John Parkin.

  • Parkin, John, 1801-1886.
Date:
1865
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: The cause, prevention, and treatment of the cattle plague / by John Parkin. 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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    diseases are such—spreading along particular lines of the earth's surface, and attacking, not only particular countries, and one part of a town, or one side of a street in preference to the other, but even certain houses in the same street, or certain floors of those houses— that they lead to the idea of the infectious character of the disease, wherever quarantine measures are adopted. The exemption of the non-infected houses is, of course, ascribed to the isolation of the sick, while the attacks in others are as naturally referred to commu- nication with the sick—a cat, a rat, a bird, or some inanimate object, being readily found, when no other and direct means are known on which to lay the blame. In order to afford another argument in support of the conclusion that the disease has been imported, we are told by Professor Symonds, that the disease does not belong to this country, but to Russia. This, however, is a very erroneous conclusion, for the disease is no more Russian than it is English. Not only did a disease, in all respects similar to the present, prevail in England in the middle of the last century, but, from time to time, during the previous five or six centuries. In 1586, there was so great a dearth of butcher's meat, in consequence of a murrain among the cattle, that human flesh was said to have been eaten. The same result was witnessed in 1588-9, during the Great Famine, when, accord- ing to the phraseology of the day, one did eat another for hunger. The only difference between the two countries is, that in Russia murrain continued to prevail for a longer period than in England, after the cessation of the epidemics of the middle ages ; while it has re-appeared there, previously to manifesting its malign influence in England. It must therefore be regarded, not as an endemic peculiar to that part of the world, but merely as an epidemic, springing up at a peculiar time, and prevailing only for a certain period in one country the same as in another. Such being the case, we may be allowed to ask, how did the disease originate in Russia in the first instance; or, in the first cases ? Not by contagion, or by importation, for we have no evidence of the disease existing previously in other localities ; while, if we had, we should still be reduced to the same dilemma, in order to account for the cause of the outbreak. There must have been a time and a place, when the disease first manifested itself; unless it could be shown that it had existed from time immemorial, which we know to be contraiy to fact. As regards the idea of such a disease being generated, in the first instance, in the body of one animal, and, then, of being propagated by infection to others, such a conclusion is simply