Selected essays and monographs : translations and reprints from various sources.

Date:
1897
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Selected essays and monographs : translations and reprints from various sources. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    have been servilely copied by succeeding authors, down to the present day, without the least acknowledgment. lie says, “ That the black hair that grows out of the parts now covered with the yaws, changes gradually white. I do not mean appears white by the ichor of the yaws drying upon it, as all the skin does towards the end of the distemper, but the substance of the hair itself is changed from black to a transparent white, like the hair of an old man.”* Hillary almost uses his identical words : “ The black hairs which grow out of the places where yaws are, gradually turn to be perfectly white, like the hair of an old man.”f Winterbottom has committed a similar mistake, in asserting that “where these eruptions appear upon any part of the body covered with hair, it is gradually changed from black to white ”; and Lagneau has copied Hume’s error in these words: “ Les poils des parties qu’elles affectent tombent ou deviennent blancs avant l’epoque fixee par l’age.” In the loth chapter of Leviticus, Moses, in several places, points out the change of the hair to a white colour as one of the most prominent and distinctive marks of the plague of leprosy, a circumstance which sets at rest the often repeated assertion of authors relative to the identity of yaws and the plague of the Egyptians. I have attended minutely to the assertions of these and succeeding authors, relative to the supposed change which the hair undergoes in the immediate vicinity of yawy excrescences, and having had ample opportunities of testing their opinions have no hesitation in saying that they are incorrect for the hair never turns white under any circumstances, and their speaking in such positive terms of this occurrence induces me to think that they were careless observers of the disease I have frequently, as in Cases VI. and X., seen the hairy scalp affected with yaws without a single hair changing its colour and did such an occurrence take place it would be daily observed amongst excrescences situated upon the perineum, pubis labia and in the axilla. Bajon has asserted that yaws can be communicated to domestic animals, but from experiments made by Dr. James Thomson, the assertion has proved to be incorrect. Dr Mosley s assertion that it is of beastly origin, is equally fanciful * lEdinbUrgh’ V01- Part e^ion