Fever, in its relations to sanitary reform, being the address in medicine, delivered ... [to the] Provincial Medical and Surgical Association / [William Davies].

  • Davies, W. (William), 1818?-1893.
Date:
1848
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Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Fever, in its relations to sanitary reform, being the address in medicine, delivered ... [to the] Provincial Medical and Surgical Association / [William Davies]. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    many others; as it does not seem necessary to occupy your time with long quotations, in proof of what every man of sound mind must admit, provided he has given the subject any attention. The third proposition is,—That there is no distinct evidence that typhus ever spreads in any other way than by contagion. I am not in a position to discuss this proposition with advantage at present, so that I will return to it at the conclusion of this Address, by which time we shall have had under our notice other matters which bear on the question. The fourth proposition is,—That the same individual is not, for the most part, subject to more than one attack during life. There are few facts in the history of disease more calculated to arrest the attention of the physician than this,—that there are certain diseases which do not possess the power of affecting the same individual, as a rule, more than once during life; and the more perfectly developed the disease has been in the first instance, the smaller is the chance of any subsequent attack. All known diseases which possess this peculiarity are contagious, but the converse of the proposition does not hold, as some contagious diseases do not possess this peculiarity. But, again, I believe it will be found that all contagious diseases which run a more or less definite course of febrile action, do possess the peculiarity in question, namely, that of occurring only once during life. It appears to me to be well-nigh demonstrable that the poisons of these diseases, namely, small-pox, measles, scarlet-fever, and typhus, are taken into the blood of the individual to be affected before the disease manifests itself, and that in the blood these poisons find the necessary materials for their own increase; hence they are contagious. It is probable that the particular material of the blood, by means of which these poisons are formed, becomes destroyed during the process, and not being essential to life is not reproduced, or only rarely, and after a long interval of time; and hence these diseases occur only once during life, just as no yeast would be formed by introducing that matter into any solution which did not contain gluten. Now if these things be so, it follows that the period between the exposure to contagion and the commencement of the disease is that