Second report on quarantine : yellow fever : with appendices / [by the] General Board of Health.

  • Great Britain. General Board of Health.
Date:
1852
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Second report on quarantine : yellow fever : with appendices / [by the] General Board of Health. 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.

    412/428 (page 402)
    Comj^arative Immunity of Females. expedition to the Niger. Staff Surgeon Lawsou mentions, that though the bhick popuh^tion in Free Town, Sierra Leone, in .]837, amounted to 1^1,000, and the European to 80; there were more cases among .the latter, than the former of whom only three died. Even length of residence would appear to give exemption, for it will scarcely be contended that, the 3,000 or 4,000 Frenchmen who fled to Philadelphia, as stated by Dr. Bancroft at the time of the epidemic there in J 793, owed their entu-e^ exemption to former attacks, unless it be admitted that the^ disease is much more constantly present, and in a more ^.mitigated form, than allowed by the contagionists. So discriminative a property as here evinced, a property so constant, uniform, and to be calculated upon, is -at variance with all our notions of a readily transmissible disease. Places not persons, says_ Dr. Fergusson; foa* though black vomit cases are from time to time carried to the mountains of Jamaica, and put into the same hospital with other patients, no instance of its ever having been communicated is known, and the same will apply to less distant and elevated places, which, were the disease con- tagious, would have furnished the strongest evidence of its powers. No less opposed to contagion is the comparative immunitv of females, the ministering angel in all our sickness, and there- fore necessarily more exposed to diseases of a contagious nature. In the epidemic of Cadiz in 1800 the mortality was 7,387, of which 5,810 were males and 1,577 females. Lygon mentions, that in the epidemic of Barbadoes in 1647, for one woman that died there were 10 men. In the epidemic of 1804 in Spain, the aggregate mortality in 23 towns was 45,822, of which 28,352 were males, and 1 7,470 females. But it is unnecessary to multiply instances; the preponderance is almost constant, and the inference to be di-awn is too conclusive, in my opinion, for any sophistry to set aside.*' There can be no proof so satisfactory of contagion, as carrying the disease from tlie place of infection, and transmitting it to the healthy at a distance. It is here the contagionists have failed, for though thousands have, from time to time, died of the disease at short distances from infected localities, and among the healthy, the few cases they have collected, and that with much difficulty, serve zather to amuse than convince, and cannot, in my opinion, stand opposed to the facts, demonstrative of the incapability of Yellow Fever sustaining the character of a viru- lent and consistent contagion. In the year 1800, says Chervin, 14,000 persons left Cadiz on the breaking out of Yellow Fever; in Alicant in 18U4, 2,110 fled; in Tortosa in 1821, 5,000; in Majorca in 1821.20,000; in Barcelona, in the same year, 80,000 persons, several of them * A limiiar preponderance is observed in periodical fevers.