The period of infection in epidemic disease / by William Squire.

Date:
1874
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: The period of infection in epidemic disease / by William Squire. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh. The original may be consulted at the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh.

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    By william SQUIEE, M.D., M.E.C.P. SBCBBTAKY TO THE EPIDEMIOLOGICAL SOCIETY. Introduction. The first object in collecting the following observations was to define with all possible accuracy the interval between the recep- tion of infection and the appearance of symptoms in some of the more common epidemic diseases. This interval, the incubation period, instead of being uncertain, unimportant, and almost without symptoms, has been found to have definite symptoms, a great influence on the .spread of measles, hooping-cough, and diphtheria, and a duration sufficiently constant to be of generic value in the classification of disease. The study of all that pertains to the ingress of disease can only be said to commence with the last century. Dr. Richard Mead, in his Essays on Poisons, published in 1702, calls attention to the long period of latency in rabies ; in a later essay* he says “contagion is a real poison,” and afterwards remarksf that the practice of inoculation “ shows that the small-pox does not break forth before the eighth or ninth day from receiving infection.” Till this was known, terror at the swift stroke of plague had impressed people with the idea that all illness was sudden, so that hydrophobia, small-pox, measles, as well as all ordinary ailments, were commonly thought to be owing to the last thing that seemed strange because it did or did not happen. The shortness of the incubation period in scarlet fever affords a ready means, still serviceable, of distinguishing that disease from measles. These, carefully separated in descriptions since the time of Sydenham, are sometimes confused in practice now as they were then. Richard Morton,J who considered scarlet fever to differ only from measles in the appeai’ance of the rash, and to be wholly the same disease, gives ten cases under the former heading, nine being measles, while the name of confluent • A Discourse on the Plague, London, 1720. Sudden seizures, attri- buted to fright, he shows to be from infection. The whole argument as to contagion is as ably stated here as in any recent discussions on cho- lera or typhus. t The Medical WorA's of Richard Mead, M.D., 4to., London, 1762, p. 317. t riTPETOAOri AS, Pars altera: sive, exercitatio de Febribus Inflam- matoriis Universalibus, authors Eichardo Morton, Lond»nj^lG94, p. 65.