Cholera in the asylum. Reports on the origin and progress of pestilential cholera, in the West-Yorkshire Lunatic Asylum, during the autumn of 1849, and on the previous state of the Institution. A contribution to the statistics of insanity and of cholera / By Thomas Giordani Wright.

  • Wright, Thomas Giordani, 1808-1898.
Date:
1850
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Cholera in the asylum. Reports on the origin and progress of pestilential cholera, in the West-Yorkshire Lunatic Asylum, during the autumn of 1849, and on the previous state of the Institution. A contribution to the statistics of insanity and of cholera / By Thomas Giordani Wright. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine Library & Archives Service. The original may be consulted at London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine Library & Archives Service.

    87/176 (page 61)
    DIURNAL REGISTER. 6.—Diurnal Registers. In tables XXXIII to XXXV, a daily record is given of the numbers attacked and the numbers ill, throughout the three months of the epidemic, distinguished into cases of diarrhoea, of dysentery, and of cholera: so that on any given day a reference to the tables -will shew, how many patients of each sex were suffering from each form of disease. At the head of each column is indicated the general dinner for the day, by initial letters for Meat, Soup, and Bice-stew ;—breakfast and supper consisting of oatmeal-ancl-milk porridge up to the 25th of October; after that date of flour porridge and tea. And to afford a ready comparison with the state of the weather during the same period, an accurate meteorological register is appended, in similar daily columns. The latter has been kindly supplied to me by my scientific friend Mr. Milner, from his records at the House of Correction, of which he is a resident medical officer; and the locality of which, a mile distant from the asylum, is sufficiently contiguous for the purpose of our illustrations. The height of the barometer is given in mean terms, from four daily observations : the maximum and minimum heat of the day recorded by the self-registering ther- mometers : and the height of the wet and dry-bu]b thermometers stated in a mean of daily observations. The amount of rain each day is also given: and the direction of the wind, at quarterly periods of the twenty-four hours. With respect to the latter it may be wTell to add, that it has been collated and corroborated by slight daily memoranda, as to the wind and weather, entered by myself in the journal book, at my daily visits to the asylum. A brief review of the data afforded by these tables will be found in sections 12 and 13,. which describe the progress and decline of the pestilence.* * A comparison of the development of cholera with contemporaneous meteorological changes, is most distinctly exhibited in some diagrams, in which I have expressed all the particulars in the adjoining tables, by rising and falling lines in parallel series. But these would be much less easily adapt- ed to the requirements of the printing-press, than numerical annotation. For a similar reason, a diagram which shews a bird's-eye view of the womens' wards, with the date and duration of every attack of illness, through the three months, by varied and continuous lines, is also omitted from the present volume.