Contributions to the etiology of continued fever, or, An investigation of various causes which influence the prevalence and mortality of its different forms / by Charles Murchison.

  • Murchison, Charles, 1830-1879.
Date:
1858
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Contributions to the etiology of continued fever, or, An investigation of various causes which influence the prevalence and mortality of its different forms / by Charles Murchison. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    central division of London there were 1,675 cases of the two former fevers, to 398 of the latter. The predilection of relapsing fever for this part of London was very remarkable. Of the total 441 cases, more than one half came from the central division; and considerably more than one third from the single district of Holborn. There are certain small courts in the vicinity of Gray’s Inn Lane, and other parts of the central division of London, which have long been justly regarded as the hot-beds of epidemic fever. They were noticed as such by Dr. Bateman more than forty years ago ;* and they still maintain their unenviable reputation. One or two of these may be men- tioned. From Pheasant Court, Holborn, there were ad¬ mitted into the Fever Hospital, during the years 1851 and 1852, sixty-six cases of relapsing fever and eight of typhus; from Tyndall’s Buildings, during the same period, thirty-two cases of relapsing fever and ten of typhus; and from Field Lane, in the City of London, in a corresponding period, twenty-three cases of relapsing fever and thirty-nine of typhus. Among other localities for typhus and relapsing fever may be mentioned Gray’s Inn Lane and Spread Eagle Court in Holborn; Plum Tree Court, in the city of London; Brill Place and Court, in St. Pancras; Devonshire Street, in Marylebone; Old Gravel Lane in St. George’s in the East, and many courts and lanes in Lambeth. This predominance of typhus and relapsing fever in the overcrowded dwellings of the poor has been a matter of universal observation in all places. In Edinburgh, where there is a greater separation between the dwellings of the rich and of the poor than in almost any city I know, typhus, even in the midst of the greatest epidemics, is for the most part confined to the most wretched closes of the “ old town.” Dr. Christison even informs us that out of about* a hundred instances, in which he had known typhus introduced into the dwellings of the better classes by medical 1 On ‘Contagious Fever,’ Lond., 1818.