Remarks on the recent report of the Royal Commission on the Contagious Diseases Act and its application to the voluntary hospital system / by John Morgan.

  • Morgan, John, 1829-1876.
Date:
1872
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Remarks on the recent report of the Royal Commission on the Contagious Diseases Act and its application to the voluntary hospital system / by John Morgan. 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.

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    such can be ascertained to be the case with the military, what mischief must be disseminated amongst the artisan and lower classes, with whom, probably owing to the Greater attractiveness of the gin palaces, and the facilities of beershops, certainly intoxication and lecklessness seem on the increase. Whereas if we rise in the social scale, while the percentage of sores may diminish, their virulence and infection power increases, being in fact reversed—16 infecting to 5 non-infecting I find the proportion. Dr. Bumstead in New York, from his independent obseivation, gives as near as may be the very same proportion as I mention (p. 25). So that the diminution in the number of the infected is painfully compensated for in the upper ranks of society, by the more infecting, and it may, I fear, be added, insidiously transmittable poison. In making statistical calculations in this disease, over- whelming difficulties are met; thus, in the registration of deaths, the number of deaths from syphilis is palpably below possibility. No one will brand the memory of a fellow creature, or of a patient, if it can be at all avoided, with the stain of syphilis ; none but the outcast and the poorest will be so recorded, much less will the deaths of chilren be inscribed against their parents, as due to syphi- litic infection. Again, the centripetal tendency of the poison, as I have signified in the index figure of this volume, leads to changes in the internal organs, which in- sidiously and silently compromise life. Mr. Paget states, in evidence— “ We now know that certain diseases of the lungs, the liver, and the spleen, are all of syphilitic origin, and the mortality from syphilis in its later forms is every year found to be larger and larger, by its being found to be a source of a number of diseases, which previously were referred to other origins and accidents, or which were put down under various heads they did not belong to.” Such an enunciation from so eminent a pathologist and surgeon is of profound interest, and is confirmed every day by medical records and by post-mortem investigations. In fact, death from the early effects of the poison being rare, while from its insidious and deteriorating influence it is not unusual. Once the poison is admitted who can assign its limit.