Epidemiology, old and new / [William H. Hamer].

  • Hamer, William Heaton, 1862-1936
Date:
1928
Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

Credit: Epidemiology, old and new / [William H. Hamer]. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    Pettenkofer in Munich declared that, in addition to x and y (the seed and the soil of the “ contagionists ”), there was a “ z ” to be reckoned with, and he thus founded the school of ££ localists.” Several papers were read, moreover, at the Epidemiological Society’s meetings in the latter half of the nineteenth century, on the relations between scarlet fever and diphtheria ; and the curious association, specially discussed by Murchison (39) and by T. W. Thompson (59), between typhus and relapsing fevers, was again and again brought under scrutiny. When cholera appeared in the “ nineties ” no one at first seems to have recollected the belief, which had some vogue in earlier prevalences of cholera, that it tended to manifest itself in association with influenza. In 1893, however, Bulstrode’s report (5a) on the outbreak of diarrhoea in the Greenwich Infirmary made it evident that this particular prevalence, one of gastro-intestinal influenza, only just missed being diagnosed as cholera ; in many instances, similar risk of like confusion was encountered in those early ££ nineties,” when cholera and influenza were both rife in Europe. Furthermore, the tendency to class gastro-intestinal prevalences by reference to the ££ causal organisms ” associated with them, and to ignore the possibility of the relation of any of these outbreaks to influenza, was con¬ spicuously apparent at this time. Water and milk and various kinds of food (ice-cream, celery, water-cress, etc.) were not unnaturally, as it was then thought, appealed to when grouped cases of fever, diarrhoea, etc., occurred. A flood of light was, however, thrown on epidemic
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