[On the clauses in the draft Glasgow Police Bill which have reference to the prevention and mitigation of disease ...].

  • Duncan, Eben.
Date:
[1882]
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: [On the clauses in the draft Glasgow Police Bill which have reference to the prevention and mitigation of disease ...]. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by The University of Glasgow Library. The original may be consulted at The University of Glasgow Library.

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    The past history of mankind teaches us that success has not hitherto attended efforts to stamp out by quarantine and disin- fection such highly contagious maladies as scarlet fever, measles, and hooping-cough. The reason of this failure will be apparent if we consider the means which veterinary surgeons have been com- pelled to adopt to prevent the spread of similar diseases among the lower animals. I quote from a book entitled The Four Bovine Scourges, recently published by Mr. Walley, the Professor of Veterinary Medicine and Surgery in Edinburgh. He says—“No temporising measures are of avail in suppressing cattle plague, and it can only be annihilated by the absolute destruction of every living animal which is the subject of the disease, or which may have been in contact with affected cattle; and not only so, but by the destruction, when practicable, of everything which is con- taminated, or may be supposed to be contaminated, with the virus of the disease.” Again, in speaking of pleuro-pneumonia, he says—“In its suppression slaughter, isolation, and external and internal disinfection can alone be relied on, with arrest of all movements to and from infected districts.” Now, gentlemen, scarlet fever and measles are quite as con- tagious as cattle plague and pleuro-pneumonia. Even if measures of slaughter were not necessary to success in an attempt to stamp out such diseases, and if we could succeed by the rigorous isolation and disinfection of every case, and by placing an infected district in quarantine, I don’t think that society is yet prepared to allow the Town Council of Glasgow to apply such drastic remedies. If we are to take any lesson from the past history of mankind, the only measures which will succeed in stamping out these diseases will either take the direction of the discovery of a vaccine, as in the case of small-pox, or in the discovery of some medicine which will so alter the state of the blood of the patient that it no longer forms a suitable food for the disease germs. For such discoveries we must look not to administrative health officers, who never can be expected to do much in this direction, but to the unselfish labours of the medical practitioner. When the disease is dying out the thorough and universal adoption of such measures as isolation and disinfection, when thoroughly carried out, will hasten the process of final extinction, but must always bear a very sub- ordinate part. In the case of small-pox—you see from this table how successful vaccination is in Glasgow—there have only been six deaths registered in four years, and five of these persons were