Caution to the public, or, hints upon the nature of scarlet fever, designed to shew, that this disease arises from a peculiar and absolute virus, and is specifically infectious in its mildest as well as in its most malignant form : including some cursory remarks upon plague and other pestilential diseases.

Date:
1831
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Caution to the public, or, hints upon the nature of scarlet fever, designed to shew, that this disease arises from a peculiar and absolute virus, and is specifically infectious in its mildest as well as in its most malignant form : including some cursory remarks upon plague and other pestilential diseases. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by The University of Glasgow Library. The original may be consulted at The University of Glasgow Library.

    18/172 (page 14)
    c.'idcd between tlie contending parties, had not tlie result of the rash experiments of these infatuated, yet honest, speculatists, put the question for ever at rest, as far as regards infection, and inoculation : the oontagionists themselves could scarcely have desired stronger or more convincing proofs, of the correctness of their doctrine respecting the nature of Plague, and its propagation, tlian were afforded by the very tests that were expressly instituted to establish the contrary doctrines. For we learn that these daring, though sincere, experimentalists, both reaped the bitter fruits of their own rashness ; the orie, in consequence of exposing himself for some time among the infectious air of a pest-house in Constantinople, the other, from inoculating himself with the poison of Plague.—See A})pend'n\ No. ?• The reader's attention would not have been occu- pied so long upon the differences of opinion upon this disease, did they not vitally concern the question of infection in general, and of absolute, and specific poisons—topics of importance abstractedly, and which may ultimately tend to illustrate the doctrine, which the writer is desirous of inculcating in these pages, touching the specific quality of each variety of Scar- let Fever. As it would be foreign to my present purpose to pursue this topic, and uiniecessary to enter into fur- ther detail on a matter which will be found so fullv, and ably, though variously discussed, in the works professedly written u])on this subject, and to wliich allusion has been made, and which will be found spe- cified in ibe Appendix, I shall, therefore, briefly re-