A treatise on relapsing or famine fever / by R.T. Lyons.

  • Lyons, R. T.
Date:
1872
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: A treatise on relapsing or famine fever / by R.T. Lyons. Source: Wellcome Collection.

    22/408 (page 6)
    prehension.* The disease, moreover, is authoritatively declared not to be relapsing fever; no form of fever answer- ing to the accounts, is to be found described in the works of the systematic writers, nor to be met with ia Calcutta, the metropolis of Lower Bengal. From the absence of intelhgible accounts of these epidemics, I have been con- strained to regard them as of unknown nature; but con- sidering the circumstances of famine or want which, it is distinctly stated, were their predisposing causes, it would bo inconsistent with the history of fever in Europe, if the Lower Bengal epidemics were not of typhus or relapsing fever, and out of keeping with the history of fever in this country if they were not of relapsing fever. The confu- sion and ambiguity of the accounts were probably owing to the intermixture with relapsing fever of typhoid fever, which is endemic in Calcutta, and also doubtless in the distncts around the metropolis. But although I have excluded the history of these epi- demics from the text, there are not wanting statements by competent observers that the disease was relapsing fever. Li the Eeport of the Charitable Dispensaries of Bengal Proper for 1866, Dr. Green, the Inspector General, thus writes of the Burdwan epidemic, p. 13: The fever sprang up at the end of the rains. In the villages and particular parts of the district, the seat of the out- break of fever, three-fourths of the population were found to have suffered under the fever. The mortahty m some places has been in greater proportion than one to three attacked; and those who have escaped with hfe irom the fever have been left prostrated, anemic, and with enlarged spleens, and anasarca. The disease may be designated relapsing fever; many are jaundiced; the fever sets m with severe symptoms at once, headache, high fever, gastnc irri- « See the Account of the Fever Epidemic of Lower Bei^gal in 1866- fiS Iw Dr Juffeo Bundo Bose, read at the annual meeting of the Bengal SkiLot'tKridsh Medical Association: Indian Medical Gazette, fTjune 1868 Dr. Chuckerbutty also has felt a difficulty m compre- hentog these accounts of the fever. He says, Nor can I maie out its ex^ct pathology and symptoms from the reports submi ted to Govern- ment by Dr. ElUoit and the Epidemic Commission.'; Chuckerbutty on Typhus: India Annals of Medical Science, no. xviu., p. i^<^.