Observations on quarantine : being the substance of a lecture, delivered at the Liverpool Lyceum, in October, 1824 / by Charles Maclean.

  • Maclean, Charles, active 1788-1824.
Date:
1824
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Observations on quarantine : being the substance of a lecture, delivered at the Liverpool Lyceum, in October, 1824 / by Charles Maclean. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    f> in the south-west side of the square, sheltered by the oppo site side of the building. Under similar circumstances of exposure, anxiety, and privations, sickness, in respect to myself, would have resulted in any climate. And what was the nature of this attack ? It was neither more nor less than fever, and treated successfully as such, which did not at any period excite apprehension, and was never, in my own opinion, of doubtful issue. Were I now obliged to choose whether 1 should have what is called the plague of the Levant, or the typhus of Batavia or Bengal, both of which I have personally experienced, or yellow fever, I should unhesitatingly prefer the first. That disease, ab- stracted from all adventitious causes of aggravation, I even deem very little different from, or severer in degree than the ordinary typhus of this and other northern countries. If patients labouring under typhus in England were neg- lected, like plague patients in the Levant, I have no doubt but the mortality among them would be quite as great. This fact is a direct, an appropriate, and alone a suffi- cient proof of the non-existence of contagion in plague, superseding all evidence of a less direct or subordinate kind. But, in my evidence before the Committee of the House of Commons on the validity of the doctrine of contagion in the plague, in 1819, I also adduced other facts, each of which, taken separately, is convincing, whilst, collectively, they are irresistible : such, for instance, are the wearing of the clothes of persons, who have died of the plague, without the disease following ; its commencement and cessation, in an epidemic form, at certain determinate periods ; and the total exemption from the malady of certain countries, as Persia, adjacent to, and having continual intercourse with