Is consumption contagious? : and can it be transmitted by means of food?

  • Clapp, Herbert C. (Herbert Codman), 1846-
Date:
1882
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Is consumption contagious? : and can it be transmitted by means of food?. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by the Harvey Cushing/John Hay Whitney Medical Library at Yale University, through the Medical Heritage Library. The original may be consulted at the Harvey Cushing/John Hay Whitney Medical Library at Yale University.

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    mands, is satisfied with perhaps half as much. Hy- drophobia lays its iron grasp, according to some authorities, on only five per cent of those bitten by the rabid animal, and even those authorities who go to the other extreme do not claim more than fifty-five per cent.' These diseases are indisputably contagious. Why this difference ? We cloak our ignorance by saying that the susceptibility varies, which is merely another method of stating the fact that the poison finds food for its sustenance in one case which it is unable to obtain in another. An analogy we find in botany and agriculture. Some plants thrive on one soil, but refuse to grow in another. For this reason, even if the number of recognized cases of consumption produced by contagion is quite small, we need not on that account abandon the doc- trine, but admit that it may be contagious to a slight extent and under certain conditions. Even this admission may be of very great practical value. Deaths from the use of chloroform by inhala- tion, as compared with the whole number of cases in which it is used, are exceedingly rare; and yet they are numerous enough to induce the great majority of physicians throughout New England (and now, we are glad to add, of a constantly increasing number throughout the world) to abandon its habitual use, and to confine themselves to sulphuric ether, which is much less satisfactory, on all other accounts than that of safety. Coincidence. — Closely related to the latter objec- tion, and, in fact, springing from it, is that advocated