Enteric fever : its prevalence and modifications, ætiology, pathology and treatment as illustrated by Army data at home and abroad / by Francis H. Welch.

  • Welch, Francis H.
Date:
1883
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Enteric fever : its prevalence and modifications, ætiology, pathology and treatment as illustrated by Army data at home and abroad / by Francis H. Welch. Source: Wellcome Collection.

    87/226 (page 71)
    Mauritius.—From i860 to 1878 the enteric ratio is about double that of the United Kingdom, but the disease much more fatal. The barracks were not of the best, but the main sanitary defects were over- crowding to 1868, and contiguity to a dirty thick population from bad selection of site, with all that this embraces in exposure to diseases of infectious nature which exist and surrounding sanitary defects. Putting on one side the disease for the year i860 as probably introduced, it throughout appears to have been essentially “sporadic,” the cases occurring all at Port Louis and derived from the civil haunts. The only time of comparative excess was in 1867 when this station had reached a marked intensity of foulness and impurity, malarial and enteric fever rife in the civil community and the military participating in both ; in the former disease to a very high ratio, in the latter to nine cases in all the garrison. Follow- ing the sanitary measures then carried out, and the reduction of the garrison, with the stringent care exercised within the barracks, we have the enteric disease all but absent, but the paludal fever remains in force. The sanitary reports of this island are in- teresting from the examples they furnish of water and air contamination by fascal material, with consecutive bowel flux from the former but no sequential enteric fever. Throughout the period susceptible and re- cently arrived members were present in the military community, yet the enteric fever was often absent, and never went beyond isolated individual cases. In 1872 there was a recrudescence of paludal fever in the 32nd regiment, “ very young men suffered in a far higher ratio than those of more mature age;” “ under