A treatise on fever, or, Selections from a course of lectures on fever : being part of a course of theory and practice of medicine / delivered by Robert D. Lyons.

  • Lyons, Robert Spencer Dyer, 1826-1886.
Date:
1861
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: A treatise on fever, or, Selections from a course of lectures on fever : being part of a course of theory and practice of medicine / delivered by Robert D. Lyons. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by The Royal College of Surgeons of England. The original may be consulted at The Royal College of Surgeons of England.

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    they are all but doubled by those which represent the mortality, from fever alone, in the subsequent decade, that of 1841-1851. This period was, as you are all doubtless well aware, made remarkable by the terrible epidemics of 1847, 48, and 49. The number of deaths from fever solely, for the whole ten-year interval, 1841-1851, amounts to no less than 222,029! And this return, you must bear in mind, takes no cognisance of the many thousands who perished by the wayside, or in the lone deserted cabin, untended and uncared-for in the general moral prostration that paralysed the sympathies as well as the energies of all. Thousands there were, as we all well know, who thus passed away uncounted and unrecorded, and whose deaths would swell the great mortuary roll of that decade, far beyond even its present terrifying proportions. Another great element is omitted, and necessarily so, from the calculations of the Census Commissioners ; I refer to the number of those who, in the general panic of emigration which then seized on so many thousands of our people, bore with them from their Irish homes the seeds of the pestilence, which ripened into fatal maturity, be- tween the crowded and stifling decks of the emi- grant ship, or upon the hospitable shores of the coun- try of their adoption, carrying death and desolation to all with whom they held intercourse on their landing. But even if we confine ourselves to the considera- tion of the mortality from fever, as furnished by the census returns, what an awful subject for contempla- tion is there presented! Again, what a fearful con- tingency is it not to anticipate, not only as possible, but as not improbable, that hundreds of thousands of B 3