Report on quarantine.

  • Great Britain. General Board of Health.
Date:
1849
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Report on quarantine. 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.

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    disease again resumed its formidable character; the admis- sions were numerous, the attendants constantly fell sick, the mortality was excessive up to the cessation of the rains, wlien the sick Avere again placed in the open air under choppers, and in about a fortnight from that time the disease ceased to exist. {Report, No. 41, p. 196.) Mr. William ShirrefF, in describing an epidemic of a similar character in the Panipat and Rhotuck districts, states that the epidemic assumed great part of its fatal character from the foul, crowded, and ill-ventilated state of the villages and liouses ; wherever the disease prevailed with severity, there filth and want of ventilation were re- markable. I believe, he continues, from what I have seen, that under ordinary circumstances the disease is not infectious; hut that when numbers of living beings are crowded together in a foul, ill-ventilated apartment, the air of the place is capable of reproducing the disease. A policeman employed at Panipat Kacheri, on returning from where the epidemic was prevailing, had the disease in its worst form, but of all his numerous comrades and others who were attending to him, fanning him, cleaning him, &c., not one was seized. The apartment in which he lay was open, clean, and well ventilated. The Panipat civil native doctor told me that he had frequently seen families in the city of whom only one suifered from the disease, though the individual may have had communication with the others. Of the six native doctors employed in treating the epidemic in the Panipat and Rhotuck districts, no one has been attacked by the fever. At Langer, none of the police who live in the well-ventilated and comparatively clean police-office, have been seized by the fever, though they must have had frequent communication with the numerous sick in that village. The facts upon which I found my opinion that, under particular circumstances, the fever is infectious are, that when one of a foul, ill- ventilated mahalla, or patriarchal house in which families related live, is seized, the fever spreads through nearly all the inhabitants, frequently proving fatal to every one. Peculiar locality does not account for this, as those houses in which all tlie inmates had died were often divided