Amoebic or tropical dysentery : its complications and treatment.

  • Brown, William Carnegie, 1859-1916.
Date:
1910
Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

Credit: Amoebic or tropical dysentery : its complications and treatment. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine Library & Archives Service. The original may be consulted at London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine Library & Archives Service.

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    PREFACE. Since Baly chose dysentery as the subject for the Goulstonian Lectures, sixty years ago, there have been many revolutionary changes in our conceptions of disease. At that time dysentery was still prevalent in Great Britain, smouldering for the most part in the slums and hovels of the poorer classes, but occasionally blazing out into virulent epidemics which attacked all sections and grades of society. Thanks to hygienic reform and progress, domestic interest in the condition has considerably narrowed ; for, although infection still lurks in the western districts of Scotland and Ireland, and lingers with a strange persistence in many of our most efficient lunatic asylums, dysentery has been practically banished from the general life of England. From an Imperial and Colonial point of view, however, the study of this disease still remains a subject of pre-eminent importance. The recent development of industrial and agri- cultural activities in our tropical possessions and the increased facilities for communication have resulted in an enormous demand for the services of Europeans, and within the last thirty years the white population has multiplied five-fold. Of the protean climatic diseases which they have still to face, dysentery is second in prevalence only to malaria, and from all classes and races it annually claims an appalling number of victims. The discovery that dysentery itself is not a single disease may be regarded as one of the most remarkable advances in modern medical science ; for, although in medicine it is impossible to claim that any theory of disease has been immutably settled, or that the
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