Volume 1

A system of medicine / edited by J. Russell Reynolds.

Date:
1866-1879
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: A system of medicine / edited by J. Russell Reynolds. Source: Wellcome Collection.

    130/976 (page 110)
    five. Between the years 1837 and 1858, out of an annual strength of 834-44 occupying those buildings, the admissions into hospital were 1529-40, and the deaths 37'20. In 1858 the “Royals” occupied the barracks, with an average strength of 1,098 ; there were 2,497 admis- sions into hospital and 104 deaths, being nearly ten per cent, of the strength. Here we have two examples, one in England the other in India, of the local existence of malaria with a like result, the production' of malignant dysentery; the symptoms and anatomical lesions, being alike in both cases, with this exception, that in the barracks, hepatic complications were common, due probably to the greater intensity of the cause, combined with high temperature, and intemperance among the soldiers. It is quite true that the provisional term malaria is a vague one. In the present state of knowledge we cannot isolate it, and must here take it to mean a poison resulting from the decay of organic matter in the soil, which, when conveyed into the body, is capable of causing a disease, of which certain anatomical lesions of the great intestine are a characteristic and invariable incident. The following are usually named as “ exciting ” causes, but, as already remarked, it is more than probable that some of them are merely active agents in propagating a disease that has a specific cause. Impure Water.—“ There is,” says Dr. Chevers, “ the strongest reason for believing that much of the Cholera and Dysentery which occur on board the vessels in the port of Calcutta is caused by drinking the always muddy and filthy and often brackish water taken up in buckets over the ship’s side. Nearly every person, native or European, who comes to Calcutta suffers, more or less, just at first, from some kind of bowel complaint, but none suffer so much as seafaring men and no wonder ; for the same authority informs us, “ that opposite Calcutta the water is frightfully impure. There it receives some forty tons of excreta daily ”—(and we may confidently assume that this enormous mass of impurity contains no inconsiderable proportion of cholera and dysentery stools, for these' diseases are always present in that most unsanitary city)—££ a multitude of bodies of dead cattle, and some 15,000 corpses yearly.” Dr. Rose makes precisely similar observations as regards seamen frequenting the port of Shanghai in China, and attributes the heavy mortality among them from dysentery to the same cause, viz. drinking river water loaded with organic impurity, and still further polluted by the excrements of an immense population. Miss Nightingale, in her summary of the Indian Sanitary Report, observes, with too much truth, “ there is no reason to hope that any station (in India) has what in this country would be called a pure water-supply, and at some it is to be feared that, when men drink water, they drink cholera with it,” and we may add, dysentery also. Exposure to Cold.—Dr. Mackay, R.N., describes the mode in which this cause operates among seamen serving in the malarious rivers of