Second report on quarantine. Yellow fever. With appendices. Presented to both Houses of Parliament by command of Her Majesty.

  • Great Britain. General Board of Health.
Date:
1852
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Second report on quarantine. Yellow fever. With appendices. Presented to both Houses of Parliament by command of Her Majesty. 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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    fever at Spanish Town from the very beginning assumed a typhoid type. There was, however, great variety, both in its progress and mode of attack. Two forms of fever might very often be observed, the tertian, the quartan, and sometimes quotidian, but the usual form was bilious remittent. When the remissions became less remarkable, the febrile anxiety and restlessness increased; the patient is unable to sleep and complains of thirst, which nothing will allay. Either vomiting or delirium was to be dreaded, and it is difficult to decide which is the most unfavour- able ; when the latter was accompanied by fever, it was generally a less fatal symptom. The paroxysms generally ran into each other, and the disease assumed the form of continued fever, the symptoms all becoming aggravated. In this stage delirium, or coma, generally set in, and the defirium frequently became so furious, that it was found necessary to confine the patient in bed. The skin in such cases was dry and hot; pulse small and very quick; tongue hard, dry and brown, or covered with a black tenacious crust, occasionally red, resembling beef-steak. When the stomach was affected, which occurred in the greater number of cases, vomiting became excessive, and everything was imme- diately rejected, whether in the shape of nutriment, or medicine; the skin assumes a dark brownish hue, afterwards changes to a livid or blue colour. These fatal cases have taken place every day, from the third and fourth, to the eighth and fourteenth day, but most commonly occurred between the fifth and eighth day. The 50th Kegiment at Spanish Town, six years in the island, which had suffered from the black vomit variety, a few months after their arrival in 1819, at this time laboured under a some- what similar fever to that in the 33rd, and in a strength of five companies, had 378 cases, and 80 deaths, which generally occurred from the fifth to the eighth day. , . The period of residence of these several regiments, implying a different constitutional susceptibility, and disease of organs, consequent upon residence and former fevers, will, I think, sufficiently explain the modification in their respective diseases, without supposing a separate and distinct cause. For none, but those who contend for this, knowing the almost uniform eruption of black vomit fever, among newly arrived regiments m Jamaica, will doubt that had the 77th been placed in either of the stations of the 33rd and 50th this year, the same description of fever would have assailed them as that from which they suffered at Stoney Hill. In the one we have the dissolved blood pouring itself out in hemorrhages and black vomit, leading, as has been suggested to paleness of the liver, and an apparently normal condition of the spleen ; in the other, we find both these organs dark, engorged, and enlarged, with the portal vessels distended with dark fluid blood. differences, taken with the symptoms during life, which the pathologist will be able to interpret and reconcile as very intelligible modifications of***™**™™ In the one we have a more dissolved state of the blood, or a less