Official report on the fever which appeared on board His Majesty's ship Bann, on the coast of Africa, and amongst the detachment of Royal Marines forming the garrison of the Island of Ascension, in the year 1823 / by William Burnett, one of the commisssioners of the medical department of His Majesty's Navy.

  • Burnett, William, Sir, 1779-1861.
Date:
1824
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Official report on the fever which appeared on board His Majesty's ship Bann, on the coast of Africa, and amongst the detachment of Royal Marines forming the garrison of the Island of Ascension, in the year 1823 / by William Burnett, one of the commisssioners of the medical department of His Majesty's Navy. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by King’s College London. The original may be consulted at King’s College London.

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    course more rapidly, often leaving- but little op- portunity of employing curative means, and re- sisting every mode of treatment; while, in the lat- ter, more time is generally given, and lience the disease is not nearly so fatal; yet even here I have seen deaths as early as the third day, with all the aggravated symptoms attending the fatal cases of tropical fevers, viz. yellow suffusion, black vomit, and speedy putrefaction of the corpse. There is still another, and, in my opinion, a most decisive fact, which occurred in the Bann while on the Jamaica station in 1820 and 1821, showing how little the appearance of yellow suffusion or black vomit is really indicative of a contagious disease, and I extract it, verbatim, from the surgeon's Journal. While His Majesty's sloop Bann was lying olF Chagre, we received on board about 40 men for a passage to Jamaica, who had been con- fined in prison and to hard labour in Panama for some months. The most of them had had attacks of intermittent fever, and all were in a weakly state of health, and much emaciated ; a few days after they came on board, intermittents began to appear, and soon assumed a continued form, and, before they could be landed at Port Royal, thirteen of them died, some having black *^ vomit and all intensely yellow, two symptoms most characteristic (in common language) of the endemic of the West. The smallness of the vessel and other circum-