Epidemic meningitis of cerebro-spinal meningitis.

  • Stille, Alfred.
Date:
1867
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Epidemic meningitis of cerebro-spinal meningitis. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by UCL Library Services. The original may be consulted at UCL (University College London)

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    or other putrefaction; nor with any miasmatic, crypto- gamic or analogous agent, like periodical fevers; nor with any telluric or aqueous emanation like dysentery; nor with a special poison like cholera, smallpox, or measles. All of these diseases have, moreover, a distinctly ascer- tainable starting point from which they widely extend; or else their ravages are confined within comparatively narrow limits; but with epidemic meningitis the case is very different. Its outbreaks have occurred almost simultaneously in regions as widely separated as Europe is from America, and annually it has made a mid-winter attack upon towns and rural districts, the salubrious and unhealthy alike, completing the cycle of its progress in a period varying between ten and fifteen years. Three such periods, at least, have occurred during the present century. The first, of eleven years, began in 1805 and terminated in 1816; the second, of thirteen years, occurred between 1837 and 1850; and the third extends from 1856 to the present time, and has already lasted for eleven years, during which the disease has been almost constantly present in Europe, but absent during four years from the United States. These two conditions, of simultane- ous appearance in widely remote places, and of an- nual recurrence for a series of years, characterize no other disease whatever. The first, indeed, is ful- filled by influenza; and it was perhaps a dim percep- tion of the analogy we have pointed out which led one writer, at least, (Wilson), to imagine the two dis- eases to be identical, a proposition which at the present day may provoke a smile, but hardly calls for refuta- tion. But no other disease than influenza affords an