Volume 1

Yellow fever : an epidemiological and historical study of its place of origin / by Henry Rose Carter ; edited by Laura Armistead Carter and Wade Hampton Frost.

  • Carter, Henry Rose, 1852-1925.
Date:
1931
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Yellow fever : an epidemiological and historical study of its place of origin / by Henry Rose Carter ; edited by Laura Armistead Carter and Wade Hampton Frost. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    statement in footnote on page 65). This is natural; the presence of dengue implies the prevalence of aegypti, and only the introduction of the microorganism of yellow fever is necessary for the occurrence of that disease. The “polka fever” was evidence of an infestation of the Brazilian coast towns with aegypti and, to that extent, a sign that the ground was prepared for the propagation of yellow fever, when introduced. At times, doubtless, the two diseases coexist. If this is recognized, light cases of yellow fever will be reported as dengue, and, even if there be no dengue, a community being usually extremely loath to admit yel¬ low fever, the light cases of yellow fever, and even the others, in the first stage of the disease, may be diagnosticated dengue, which will “turn into yellow fever” as deaths become common—a few deaths would be explained away. Malarial fever Host-borne, by the Anopheles mosquito, prevalent in hot climates, and with some of its manifestations very like yellow fever, it would be a wonder if malaria were not confounded with yellow fever. Also, since malaria was well known in Europe, the tendency would be to consider yellow fever malaria rather than the reverse. This was done; and it was not until well into the nineteenth century that we find the two diseases generally recognized as distinct in nature, the older view being that yellow fever was merely an intense form of paludism. William Fergusson (1823, pp. 294-295), Inspector General of Army Hospitals, groups as one the famous Walcheren fever in Zealand that crippled the Earl of Chatham’s army, and that which he had seen on the tablelands of Barbados in the West Indies. He sums up: “the inten¬ sity” of the paludal fevers produced “from the common ague of the fens of Lincolnshire up to the aggravated yellow fever or malignant Remittent of the West Indies, may be measured almost to a certainty by the solar heat of the countries.” Chisholm (1801), on the other hand, made no mistake in his pathology when he pronounced the “Fever of Bulam” which he observed in 1793 as distinct from the fevers hitherto prevailing in Grenada and the adjacent Windward Islands. He did err in his nosology when he called the latter “the yellow fever of the West Indies.” Yellow fever had existed in these islands, certainly in the latter part of the seventeenth century, from the so-called “epidemic of the Oriflamme”—the umal de Siam.” It had been confounded with the paludal fevers, and the severer cases of