North American Medical and Surgical Journal, Vol. 2, No. 3, July, 1826Various
History
North American Medical and Surgical Journal, Vol. 2, No. 3, July, 1826
Various
Medicine -- Periodicals
How else than on the principle of infection, and not of contagion, can
we explain the attack of individuals frequenting those parts of the
city, where the disease had originated, and which (all the inhabitants
having been removed to some distant situation) had been barricaded? How
could we, in any other way, account for the exemption from the fever of
individuals, who, out of the infected district, nursed, touched, and
even slept with their diseased relatives and friends; and not always in
clean and well ventilated apartments and parts of the city; but, in very
many instances, in the filthiest hovels, and alleys, and among the
lowest classes of society. Striking and unanswerable facts of the sort
have frequently presented themselves to my observation, during our
various epidemics. Children have sucked their parents, affected with the
fever, and, in one case which fell under my notice, the child continued
attached to the breast after its mother's death; and in all such
instances with impunity. I have constantly reprobated the practice of
burning the clothes and bedding of the dead, and have never found any
bad results to occur to those who followed my advice. From a
consideration of all these facts, I must once more express it as my
decided opinion, that the yellow fever, so far as I have had an
opportunity of observing it, is not a contagious disease.
_Treatment._--Whatever opinion we may entertain respecting the specific
nature of yellow fever, I was early convinced that this disease was not
to be treated by specific remedies, and that our curative indications
should be formed on an attentive consideration of the condition of the
system in general, and of particular organs, as pointed out by the
symptoms during life and the morbid lesions after death.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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