Medical Sketches of the Expedition to Egypt, from IndiaMcGrigor, James, Sir
History
Medical Sketches of the Expedition to Egypt, from India
McGrigor, James, Sir
Great Britain. Army -- Sanitary affairs; Medicine, Military
The time was, when fever, when it broke out in different parts of
England, proved little less fatal to whole villages and towns than the
plague does in the countries where it resides. From the improved practice
of the treatment of fever, but more from our knowledge of the means of
destroying contagion and preventing its spreading, the mortality from
this class of diseases is now comparatively small.
The small-pox, that plague which once carried off so great a proportion
of the population of Europe, now bids fair to be expunged from the
catalogue of diseases.
May we not indulge a hope, that, as the intercourse of civilized Europe,
with the countries of which the plague is now the scourge, becomes more
regular and intimate, we may be enabled to extend to them our discoveries
and improvements, and so direct them to the means of divesting the plague
of its terrors, and reducing the mortality from it to the scale of that
of fever and the small-pox in Europe?
Egypt has been called the cradle of the sciences. From this we
acknowledge, that the arts were derived to Greece, and subsequently to
every part of the world. It would surely be the noblest gratification,
if in return, at this period, Europe, by extending her benefits and
improvements to Egypt and to Greece, could free them from the most cruel
scourge of countries, once the most civilized and polished in the world.
It would in some measure compensate and console them for the low state of
degradation into which they have fallen.
All that I have to say of the plague will tend to diminish the dread
which has hitherto been entertained of it.
A formidable disease undoubtedly it is; but, when we hear how much of
the population of Persia, Arabia, Turkey, Syria, Egypt, and Barbary,
is now and then swept off, all must not be laid to the account of the
plague, as if its ravages admitted of no remedy. The experience of the
French and English, in Egypt, will now convince Europe, that much of the
vast mortality, in the above countries, is to be ascribed to the gross
ignorance in which they are immersed.
Were typhus, our jail or hospital fever, to be imported into a town of
Egypt, we can hardly conceive how it could ever be eradicated by the
natives. Whenever the small-pox does appear in that country, it proves a
dreadfully-destructive disease. The structure of their houses and plans
of their streets are calculated for the production of disease, and the
preservation and concentration of contagion.
It is a matter of no little consolation to us, that we know the means,
not only of excluding the plague from our own country, but that, when our
armies are stationed in the countries where the disease is endemic, we
can arrest the progress of the contagion, and with certainty eradicate it.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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