Observations on the period of incubation of scarlet fever and of some other diseases / by Charles Murchison.

Date:
1878
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Observations on the period of incubation of scarlet fever and of some other diseases / by Charles Murchison. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh. The original may be consulted at the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh.

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    Hill- and on arriving they found the eldest boy of the family referred to living with her. He had hitherto escaped the disease, and was living with his grandmother in the hope that he might escape it aWether. But on this very Saturday he had for the first tame a constant troublesome cough. Mrs. B., being afraid on account of her own children, and believing that the boy was in the ear y stage of hoopin cough, did all she could to avoid him; but he clung to her during the whole evening, climbing on her knee and coughing and sneezing over her. When she got home at night she took off her dress and laid it over an ottoman under a window in the dressing room, intending next morning to have it hung out in the open air. Unfor- tunately! however, the eldest of the three children referred to came into the dressing room early next morning and began playing at the window over the dress. As soon as this was noticed she was sent away, and the dress was carried out of doors. Exactly thirteen days afterwards, on the Saturday, this little girl appeared to have caught a bad cold, and ten days later she began to hoop. The two youngest children caught the disease from her, and both sickened about a fortnight after she first showed signs of illness. The seven other children in the family escaped; but they had had hooping cough before. Typhus Fever.—In this disease also there is no fixed period of incubation. In a paper published in the second volume of the ' St. Thomas's Hospital Beports,' * in which I collected 31 cases where I had been able to determine the period of incubation of typhus fever, I arrived at the following conclusions:— . 1. The period of incubation of typhus varies in duration in different cases. 2. In a large proportion of cases it is about twelve days. 3. In exceptional cases it is longer than twelve days ; but it rarely, if ever, exceeds three weeks. 4. In many cases (one third or more) it is less than twelve days, and occasionally there is scarcely any latent period, the symptoms commencing almost at the instant of exposure to the poison. These results were confirmed by Virchow, and also by Obermeier in the Berlin epidemic of 1867-8 f ; while of eight cases in which the incubation-period of typhus was deter- mined by Obermeier in the Berlin epidemic of 1873, in two it was seven days, in two it was less than nine days, in one it * ' On the Period of Incubation of Typhus, Relapsing Fever, and Enteric Fever,' 'St. Thomas's Hospital Reports,' vol. ii., 1872. See also second edition of my work on ' The Continued Fevers of Great Britain,' 1873, p. 90. ■(■ Obermeier, loc. cit. A2