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.

    274/476 (page 242)
    by a doctor of West Indian experience, about 1820. At present in liji no doubt is entertained on the subject, either by medical men who have studied the description given of yaws, or by planters who have had West Indian experience of it. Further, the few cases we have had of it in the Public Hospital here were diagnosed by the one of us as “ Coko ” from Fijian experience, and diagnosed as yaws by the other, and by men with local, West Indian, or West African experience of that disease. The plates, both coloured and black and white, in Dr. Nicholls’ report would serve equally well for “ Coko/’ especially II., III., part of IV., VI., IX., X., and XI., and particularly' XIII., and these wrere the plates selected by the Surgeon- General, Dr. Ross, of considerable Jamaican and West African experience of the disease, as most typical. In my * opinion there is no doubt that the cases of yaws I have seen here are identical in appearance, in course for the limited period whilst under observation, and in behaviour under treatment, with hundreds of cases of “ Coko” I saw in Fiji. Dr. Nicholls quotes a description of “Coko” by Dr. MacGregor (1875), and lays stress on the protrusion of separate papillae, of an inch in length, from the excrescence, and the frequent forma- tion of a cap over the excrescence, beneath which pus is found, as showing a distinction between the diseases. In plate XXII. of his own report a section of a small granu- loma is given showing very markedly the enlargement of the papillae. In cases of yaws now in the Georgetown Hospital there were on several of the excrescences yellow caps, removable entirely, and with pus beneath them, though in by far the greater number of excrescences the typical surface is seen to be partly covered by yellow^ deposit without pus beneath. The stages of the disease as described by Dr. Nicholls are very similar: there is a prodromal stage with more or less pyrexia, pains, mainly muscular, preceding the eruption. In one case these pains (in the back) were so severe (the tempera- ture being 103° F.) that the hospital attendant, a Eurasian, who had been head dispenser on a coolie immigrant ship, and had had considerable experience of small-pox, diagnosed it as a case of the latter complaint. * C. W. D.