On the local origin of the yellow fever epidemic of British Guiana / in a letter from Daniel Blair to John Davy, with appended documents.

  • Blair, Daniel.
Date:
[1851?]
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: On the local origin of the yellow fever epidemic of British Guiana / in a letter from Daniel Blair to John Davy, with appended documents. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by The Royal College of Surgeons of England. The original may be consulted at The Royal College of Surgeons of England.

    10/38
    titioner in the colony, be never stood high, either with the public or the profession. Neither did Sir Andrew Halliday's character stand high in this community. Here he was celebrated chiefly for his credulity, on which some of the wags of the colony cruelly played, and for his patronage of quack medicines. However the neglect of the profession may be accounted for, Dr. Fraser's narrative remained without public contradiction from the faculty. No doubt many a successful fable has been similarly established. None of the chief practitioners seemed to regard the effect of Dr. Fraser's letter abroad, where the true circumstances were unknown, nor to care for it, except Staff-Surgeon Hackett, and his hands soon became too full of his own special duties to allow time for extraneous work. I think the reviewer is hardly fair or correct in his estimate of the treatment described in the monograph. He says there is nothing new in it, and that it has been tried five hundred times, and that it is founded on a crazy hyphothesis long since exploded. I suppose he refers to Dr. Chisolm's mercurial treatment, which also was ex- tensively tried and given up as useless here, when he inveighs against calomel. But the treatment recommended, I submit, is a very dif- ferent affair. It is founded on no hypothesis whatever. It is purely empirical, and became established from the surprisingly beneficial effects found to follow its adoption. I should be very sorry indeed if the remarks of the reviewer were to deter any medical man, who has to encounter such fevers as are epidemic or endemic in this colony, from trying the plan recommended. The making of our medical men acquainted with the power of the combination of calomel and quinine in large doses in febrile diseases, I look on as a considerable compen- sation for the ravages of our late epidemic. The physician here now wields a power over the most formidable disease, such as he never before possessed, and with results as striking as the feats of the surgeon. On the day on which I got the October number of the Medico-Chirurgical Review, while it was yet in my carriage, I had to see the daughter of Mr. W. Hick (a merchant, in Water Street) in consultation. I was told that on the Thursday previously, she had had apparently a paroxysm of intermittent fever; it left her on Friday, and she went out on Saturday morning. While out the fever returned. She had taken no medicine in the intermission. Notwith- standing active treatment, by purgatives, diaphoretics, &c., the hot stage never remitted up to Monday, at 3 r. m., when I saw her for the first time since the attack. She was then intensely hot; pulse rapid; headache intolerable ; extreme restlessness and jactitation. We prescribed the large dose of calomel and quinine, and a blister to nape of neck; went back in four hours, and found a state of complete