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
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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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    have alleged to be always imported. The presence of cases of Yellow Fever in non-epidemic years in the West Indies may be gathered from the following extract of a letter from a private practitioner in Jamaica :— Isolated cases of Yellow Fever, of most malignant type, ter- minating in black vomit or black dejections, present themselves every season in particular localities among new comers. The experience of several years of professional connexion with the parishes of St. Dorothy, Vere, and the low lands of Clarendon, has afforded me ample opportunities of ascertaining this fact. I find by the military medical reports, that cases of black vomit fever have occurred to a greater or less extent in one err more of the Windward and Leeward Islands every year from 1816 to 1847, with the exception of 5 years; and that Jamaica, from 1817 to 1838, when the troops commenced to be quartered in the mountains, was only one year exempt from such cases. This tells both ways, either for the almost constant presence of local causes for the production of the disease, or that of contagion. I leave to disputants to settle the question, I need not say to which I subscribe. One would suppose that a disease so marked, peculiar, and differing from all other diseases, as the Yellow Fever is said to do, would have been immediately recognised on its intro- duction in any place were it of foreign origin, but so much has it simulated the ordinary fevers in Gibraltar, that in all the invasions in that gai-rison in 1804, 1813, and 1828, we find great difference of opinion among medical men at the outset, not only as to the identity of the disease, but to any disease different from what they had been accustomed to see frequently. In 1828, Mr. Dix saw no difference from cases he had observed annually, and Mr. Wilson, of the Civil Hospital, saw nothing unusual in the epidemic, except in severity of grade; he had seen black vomit fever almost every year, felt no alarm, and did not report.* In fact, there are good grounds for believing that the presence of the Yellow Fever was determined by all but the importers of contagion, by the increase of cases and mortality rather than anything peculiar or novel in the nature of the disease. If there be any fact well established in Yellow Fever, it is the impossibility of transporting it to the free and open country, or even to short distances from the scene of its ravages. The non- extension of the disease to Brooklyn and other villages adjacent to New York, as noticed by Dr. Millar ; to the neutral ground at Gibraltar; or to the encampment of troops ; prove to my mind the absence of anything like a contagious principle. The crew of the Eclair, by being placed in the fort at Boa Vista, were brought from Scylla to Charybdis, and in no similar case could we look for a different result; but the whole history of the disease confirms the fact that, wherever the physical conditions