Observations on the oriental plague, and on quarantines, as a means of arresting its progress, addressed to the British Association of Science ... 1838 / [Sir John Bowring].

  • Bowring, John, 1792-1872
Date:
1838
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Observations on the oriental plague, and on quarantines, as a means of arresting its progress, addressed to the British Association of Science ... 1838 / [Sir John Bowring]. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    rounded me on the one hand with thousands and tens of thousands of cases, in which the most intimate intercourse with persons ill or dead of the plague—4he dwelling in their houses—the wearing their garments—the sleeping in their beds, were not followed by disease in any shape, I was called on the other to listen to stories as evidence of the con¬ tagiousness of plague, so puerile, so ridiculous, that nothing but oriental credulity could by possibility be satisfied by them. The facts, the multitudinous facts, the masses of evidence were opposed to the popular Levantine belief; and that belief soon appeared to me to rest for the most part on stories or theories, of whose character I will enable you to judge. The plague breaks out in a house—the strictest quarantine has been kept — invention is immediately on the rack to dis¬ cover how the disease has penetrated. In cases reported to me at Alexandria and Cairo, where it was not pretended that the door had been entered, or any communication taken place with the town, the entrance of the plague was thus accounted for. First, in an instance where a very timid person, an alarmed contagionist, who was attacked and died of the plague, had shut himself up in his chamber; it was found that his son had, for his amusement, let up a kite from the roof of the house, and it was supposed that the kite-string had been touched by a bird, which bird was ima¬ gined to come from the infected quarter of the city; the plague entered the house down the string of the kite, and the son’s father became the victim. In another case, where the plague penetrated a house kept in the strictest quaran¬ tine, a cat had been seen to spring into a basket of clothes returning from the wash-house, and thence to leap into the window of the house in question. It was said the clothes belonged to some family which had prob¬ ably had the plague; but, at all events, the cat was the only intruder who had violated the cordon, and was there¬ fore the introducer of the disease. In a third instance, an Arab girl had hung a shirt out of a window to dry; the