North Carolina Medical Journal. Vol. 3. No. 4. April, 1879Various
Science
North Carolina Medical Journal. Vol. 3. No. 4. April, 1879
Various
Medicine -- North Carolina -- Periodicals; Medicine -- Periodicals
“The condition under which cholera infantum appears, and the _only_
condition essential to its development, is continued high temperature
day and night—a mean thermometer above 75°, with small daily range. This
high and slightly varying temperature continued from six to ten days,
will invariably, in our climate, bring cholera infantum (together with
the bowel trouble symptomatically more or less distinct, but
pathologically akin to cholera infantum), and the longer this condition
of things continues the more numerous and the more intractable the cases
become. This is as true in the country as in the city, though we are led
to think, as we read the books, that this is a disease of the city
especially. Deaths are registered, to be sure, and the books are made in
the cities, but if the conditions above mentioned exist in the country,
the disease appears there—of course, not a great many cases, for the
susceptible bodies furnished by a single block in the city would
outnumber those of two or three square miles in the country—yet I am
glad to admit that the _conditions_ for obvious reasons are not so
likely to be present in the country; the contrast, in point of green
grass, shade, cool water, and moving air, is no less marked than is the
percentage of mortality, and it is _no more_ marked.
“Few, if any, recoveries take place until the temperature falls; this
fall is usually attended by rain; but this does not seem to be
essential, the fall of temperature alone being sufficient to bring about
a better state of things. When the temperature falls, cases improve and
new cases cease to appear. Sewer emanations do not seem to have anything
directly to do with the production of disease, except so far as they
tend to impair the general health, and thus diminish the power of the
system to resist any disease producing influence, and sewer poisons are
no less abundant and deadly at other times than they are when cholera
infantum cases are most numerous, and this is the time of year above
others when the sewers are abundantly ‘flushed.’”
Filth he does not consider is any more abundant in the summer, and the
disease declines with the increase of the very rains that favor
increased decomposition. He does not attach much importance to unripe
fruits as a causative element. “For whoever saw a youngster who would
not exchange all his earthly possessions for a green apple, and whoever
saw a child in good health injured by an unripe apple or by any quantity
not altogether unreasonable?” And then the sufferers from cholera
infantum are all under two years, and hence have not arrived at the
green-fruit eating stage of their existence.
Nine tables are constructed, showing the weekly mortality from cholera
infantum in Philadelphia, New York, Boston, Baltimore, Cincinnati and
Chicago, and also as far as possible the record of thermometric range.
An analysis of the table bears out the author’s views as regards the
causative influence of continued high temperature.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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