A theory of the causation and suggestions for the prevention of dysentery : together with hypotheses on the causation and views as to the prevention of typhoid, cholera, yellow fever, remittent, diphtheria, typhus, and other zymotic diseases in man and animals / by Mucor.

Date:
1873
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: A theory of the causation and suggestions for the prevention of dysentery : together with hypotheses on the causation and views as to the prevention of typhoid, cholera, yellow fever, remittent, diphtheria, typhus, and other zymotic diseases in man and animals / by Mucor. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by the Francis A. Countway Library of Medicine, through the Medical Heritage Library. The original may be consulted at the Francis A. Countway Library of Medicine, Harvard Medical School.

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    would involve the supposition of extremely dry weather—a condi- tion antagonistic to epidemics of cholera, typhoid, and dysentery. I therefore suspect that general epidemic diarrhoea, [as well as some local prevalent diarrhoeas among children possibly,] depend on mildews, or moulds, upon excrement. At the same time the probability of the extension of these mildews over other organic matter, must not be overlooked. Although I cannot dwell upon this large and important subject, the mildew hypothesis enables one to apprehend the fearful mor- tality among children in excrement-sodden localities—more espe- cially in localities where surface-pollution is extensive. For it may readily be understood that low vegetable organisms of the simplest forms, may occur under conditions that exclude a more highly organised vegetation ; and may be almost invariably present when sueh cryptogamic plants as the cholera, typhoid, dysentery, and other, fungi, cannot be created, owing to the absence of some one or more of the required conditions. And these simple vegetable organisms may set up disease in children, though they may pass through the system of the adult, without inducing functional derangement. 457. The diarrhoea of India is a terrible thing for Europeans to encounter. Once set up, there is very little hope of shaking it off, except by leaving the country. Change of air is tried in India itself, in vain, as might be expected j for what is it but a removal from one foecalised spot to another ? Even the hills are con- taminated, and sufferers from the exhausting diarrhoeas of the plains, go up there to change their particular forms of the disease, into what is known as the Simla trots. And not only is India cursed with malarious diarrhoeas, but every tropical and sub- tropical country, in a direct ratio to the degree of its excrement- pollution. In any one of them you may live healthily enough, if you can only steer clear of the people; but if you have to be among them, you are fortunate if you get off with diarrhoea. The infantile diarrhoea of such places as Liverpool, is merely the European representative of the diarrhoeas of hot countries. The excrement-sodden lanes and alleys engender only a mild inert mildew, merely capable of destroying a few thousands of infants yearly, throughout all England; but a larger- field and a hotter sun produce more potent germs on an immense scale. 458. While upon this subject, I may allude to another European prototype of an Indian disease—Summer Diarrhoea, or Sporadic, or Bilious, or English, Cholera. What is this but the result of an excrement mildew—a mildew developed under peculiar climatic conditions, analogous to those of the exotic cholera mildew? It is clearly a closely allied species; though, fortunately, less dangerous and more ephemeral. Yet this English mildew is virulent enough to kill on occasion; and the mode of death is, sometimes, so precisely similar to that caused by the Indian fungus, that the highest author- ities declare there is no perceptible essential difference in the manifestations. Is it a legitimate supposition that the Asiatic