An essay on the principal causes which unite in producing and diffusing disease : being the address in medicine, read before the Seventeenth Annual General Meeting of the Provincial Medical and Surgical Association, held at Worcester, August 1st and 2nd, 1849 / by Charles William Bell.

  • Bell, Charles William, 1811?-1862.
Date:
1849
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: An essay on the principal causes which unite in producing and diffusing disease : being the address in medicine, read before the Seventeenth Annual General Meeting of the Provincial Medical and Surgical Association, held at Worcester, August 1st and 2nd, 1849 / by Charles William Bell. 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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    U threw thousands of work-people out of employment, combined to render land-scurvy deplorably prevalent; and the famine fever, or lowest form of petechial typhoid, became very frequent; but except in the two quarters of the town, inhabited almost exclusively by Irish, there was absolutely no eruptive typhus in Manchester; and even there it was as yet infrequent. This, however, did not Ion continue to be the case. Every wretched and over-crowded lodging in the Irish quarter was soon filled with infected families from Ireland, and became a focus of disease, and then the two causes of fever, in combined operation on the same individual, were manifested in the great majority of cases, for the specific eruption appeared mixed up with the petechise of putrid fever. After this typhus rapidly spread into other districts. The multitudes attacked in the end of 1847 and beginning of 1848 were countless, for of the whole native population of Manchester scarcely one had acquired immunity from contagion by previous attack. It was not till the autumn of 1848, when most of those exposed and liable to the disease had passed through the infection, that specific typhus rapidly decreased; and since the commence- ment of the present year, (1849,) the number of patients admitted into the Manchester fever wards has gradually fallen to its yearly average. Of this number, only about a third are now (July) cases of true specific typhus, the others being of the ordinary typhoid of the town, modified by epidemic influence, or of that low congestive form of fever, afterwards to be described, which belongs to the reigning epidemic constitution. Of these latter, however, almost all have previously suffered within the last two years from specific typhus; if not, they are in danger of contracting it in hospital, as happened not unfrequently when it first began to prevail, and the attack was often considered as a relapse of the previous typhoid. Suffice it, then, to say that typhus spread till all who were exposed to its contagion, and who had not been previously affected, had taken it, and then it very rapidly decreased. But the Board of Health has bound itself down to the assertion (page 5) that “Typhus, scarlatina, influenza, plague, yellow fever, and cholera, are all dependant on certain atmospheric conditions, and all obey similar laws of diffusionin other words, that all fevers, whether of specific or other origin, are propagated solely by epiHemic influence. At page 6, this view is intended to be still