Influenza / by W.T. Gairdner, M.D., LL.D., Professor of Medicine in the University of Glasgow.

  • Gairdner, W. T. (William Tennant), Sir, 1824-1907.
Date:
[1890]
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Influenza / by W.T. Gairdner, M.D., LL.D., Professor of Medicine in the University of Glasgow. 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.

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    occasion either to speak or to write about influenza. And if I have now been persuaded to do so, it has not been because of any great amount of new personal experience, but simply because the duty was laid upon me, as already stated. So far as observed hitherto, the present epidemic, which has been so widespread and fatal on the Continent, and which has been very notably present in London, and even in Edinburgh, has visited us, if at all, mildly and in a very scattered and rather un- accountable fashion. We are upon the fringe of the epidemic, rather than immersed in it. Of course, we have all of us seen cases, almost every winter, and not seldom also at other seasons, of feverish colds which we often call influenza, and which sometimes run into quasi-epidemic, and very probably more or less infectious, forms. Have we seen anything more than this upon the present occasion ? My own experience, in hospital and elsewhere, though very carefully watched, follow- ing the lines suggested by the epidemic of 1857, appeared to me not to afford a decisive answer to this question. I there- fore determined to issue circulars, which were posted just three days ago, to a number of medical friends whom I considered as fairly representative men in public and private practice, inviting them to submit to me in writing, in the briefest possible manner, such observations as I could be supposed to use, not in detail, but simply as a guide to my own mind in estimating the facts while addressing you to-day. I also placed myself in communication with Dr. Russell, at the Sanitary Office, and with Professor Grant, at the Observatory, and from each of them have received valuable, though very condensed, information. As the result of it all I now fully believe that I have myself witnessed cases that are in some measure the result of the epidemic influence; but I am bound to admit that they have been few, and for the most part not very striking or characteristic individually, and perhaps none of them so very typical as to deserve to be cited as examples of what people are calling, naturally enough, but not over wisely, Russian influenza, as if it were an entirely distinct or new disease. Well, then, does that prove the negative ? Have we, or have we not, had with us the “ Russian ” or true influenza ? The negative of this would be, I think, a very rash conclusion, because even Russian, or Viennese, or Parisian influenza, as it has been recently observed, is not, as regards its symptoms in individual cases, an entirely distinct, or at least distinctly recognisable, disease. Take the case, in some respects analogous, in others widely different, of “ Asiatic ” cholera as compared with its “British,” or ordinary summer