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
This great epidemic was mainly one of relapsing fever. The patient “got
the cool,” or passed the crisis of the fever, usually on the evening of
the fifth or seventh day, sometimes on the ninth, the evening
exacerbation, which was to prove critical, being ushered in generally with
a rigor, and passing off in profuse perspiration throughout the night. The
five-day fever was more certain to relapse than that of seven days, the
seven-day fever was more likely to relapse than that of nine days. The
relapses might be one or two or three or more, prolonging the illness for
weeks. The clear interval varied from twenty-four hours to fourteen days.
There were some cases with jaundice which led Stokes and Graves to speak
loosely of “yellow fever[484].” O’Brien saw only four cases with exquisite
icterus in fifteen hundred cases of relapsing fever. There was a small
proportion of cases of ordinary typhus of a severe kind, marked by
unusual delirium or phrensy and the absence of sordes on the teeth or
petechiae on the skin; the typhus cases became more numerous in the winter
season, or, in other words, the original attack lasted to nine, eleven, or
thirteen days, with little or no tendency to relapse. Gangrene was not
uncommon in one part of the body or another, and in four cases the feet
became gangrenous[485].
Even with the admixture of pure typhus cases, and with dysenteric
complications in the autumn and winter, the mortality of the whole
epidemic was small--not more than it would have been among a third part
the number of fever cases in an ordinary year. At the Cork Street Hospital
alone (including the tents) there were 8453 admissions from 4th August,
1826, to 4th April, 1827, with 332 deaths, or four deaths in a hundred
cases. The proportion of recoveries was quite as remarkable in known
instances in the squalid homes of the poor, where two or three would be
found ill of fever on one pallet, or a father and six children in one
room, shunned by the neighbours.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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