A treatise on plague: the conditions for its causation, prevalence, incidence, immunity, prevention and treatment / by Major George S. Thomson.

Date:
1901
Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

Credit: A treatise on plague: the conditions for its causation, prevalence, incidence, immunity, prevention and treatment / by Major George S. Thomson. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh. The original may be consulted at the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh.

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    CHAPTER I DEFINITION AND ETIOLOGY Definition.—Plague is an acute, specific febrile, in- oculable, and otherwise communicable, epidemic, conta- gious, eruptive disease characterised by sudden onset, without premonitory bodily symptoms, a very high mor- tality especially amongst dark-skinned races, by the appearance of huboes and occasionally of carbuncles and petechiae, and associated with the presence of a specific micro-organism in the affected lymphatic glands, or sputum, in the pneumonic variety, or in the blood and spleen, in fatal cases. Plague in many particulars resembles typhus, and has by many of the older writers been claimed to be but a more malignant form of that disease. Like typhus, it is sometimes accompanied by petechise; and, indeed, post-mortem examination generally reveals those erup- tions on the mucous coats of the viscera in plague, but the petechise of plague are larger than typhus, more significant of the putrescent changes within, and in fully eighty-five per cent, of all cases associated with buboes and rarely (according to recent experience) with car- buncles, these latter forming the diagnostic and essential characteristic of the disorder. It is probably dependent for its origin on putrefactive changes in animal products, and, like enterica, is usually transmitted in an indirect manner, through clothing or other articles in use by those B