A History of Epidemics in Britain, Volume 2 (of 2): From the Extinction of Plague to the Present TimeCreighton, Charles
History
A History of Epidemics in Britain, Volume 2 (of 2): From the Extinction of Plague to the Present Time
Creighton, Charles
Epidemics -- Great Britain -- History
The fever was often an insidious languishing, without great heat, and
marked most by tossing and wakefulness, which might pass into delirium;
when it went through the members of a family or the inmates of a house,
there would be some cases concerning which it was hard to say whether they
were cases of typhus or not. Misery and starvation brought it on, and
often it was itself but a degree of misery and starvation. “I have found,”
says Ferriar, “that for three or four days before the appearance of
typhus in a family consisting of several children, they had subsisted on
little more than cold water.” “It has been observed,” says Langrish, “that
those who have died of hunger and thirst, as at sieges and at sea, etc.,
have always died delirious and feverish.” The fever was on the whole a
distinct episode, but in many cases it had no marked crisis. “Those women
who recovered,” says Ferriar, “were commonly affected with hysterical
symptoms after the fever disappeared;” and again: “Fevers often terminate
in hysterical disorders, especially in women; men, too, are sometimes
hysterically inclined upon recovering from typhus, for they experience a
capricious disposition to laugh or cry, and a degree of the globus
hystericus.” These were probably the more case-hardened people, inured to
their circumstances, their healthy appetite dulled by the practice of
fasting or “clemming,” or by opium, and their blood accustomed to be
renovated by foul air. If the limit of subsistence be approached
gradually, life may be sustained thereat without any sharp crisis of
fever, or with only such an interlude of fever as differs but little from
a habit of body unnamed in the nosology.
The worst kind of typhus, often attended with delirium, crying and raving,
intolerable pains in the head, and livid spots on the skin, ending fatally
perhaps in two or three days, or after a longer respite of stupor or
waking insensibility, was commonly the typhus of those not accustomed to
the minimum of well-being--the typhus of hardy felons newly thrown into
gaol, of soldiers in a campaign crowded into a hospital after a season in
the open air, of sailors on board ship mixing with newly pressed men
having the prison atmosphere clinging to them, of judges, counsel,
officials of the court and gentlemen of the grand jury brought into the
same atmosphere with prisoners at a gaol-delivery, of the wife and
children of a discharged prisoner returned to his home, of the
gaol-keeper, gaol-chaplain, or gaol-doctor, of the religious and
charitable who visited in poor localities even where no fever was known to
be, and most of all of country people who crowded to the towns in search
of work or of higher wages or of a more exciting life.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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