Personal Narrative Of Travels To The Equinoctial Regions Of America During The Years 1799-1804 - Volume 1 - By Alexander Von Humboldt And Aime Bonpland.
- Page 313 of 407 - First - Home
(* In The Oriental Plague (Another Form Of Typhus
Characterised By Great Disorder Of The Lymphatic System) Immediate
Contact Is Less To Be Feared Than Is Generally Thought.
Larrey
maintains that the tumified glands may be touched or cauterized
without danger; but he thinks we ought not to risk putting on the
clothes of persons attacked with the plague.
- Memoire sur les
Maladies de l'Armee Francoise en Egypte page 35.) The sick, when
removed to the inland country, and especially to cooler and more
elevated spots, to Xalapa, for instance, do not communicate typhus
to the inhabitants of those places, either because the disease is
not contagious in its nature, or because the predisposing causes
are not the same as in the regions of the shore. When there is a
considerable lowering of the temperature, the epidemic usually
ceases, even on the spot where it first appeared. It again breaks
out at the approach of the hot season, and sometimes long before;
though during several months there may have been no sick person in
the harbour, and no ship may have entered it.
The typhus of America appears to be confined to the shore, either
because persons who bring the disease disembark there, and goods
supposed to be impregnated with deleterious miasms are there
accumulated; or because on the sea-side gaseous emanations of a
particular nature are formed. The aspect of the places subject to
the ravages of typhus seems often to exclude all idea of a local or
endemical origin. It has been known to prevail in the Canaries, the
Bermudas, and among the small West India Islands, in dry places
formerly distinguished for the great salubrity of their climate.
Examples of the propagation of the yellow fever in the inland parts
of the torrid zone appear very doubtful: that malady may have been
confounded with remitting bilious fevers. With respect to the
temperate zone, in which the contagious character of the American
typhus is more decided, the disease has unquestionably spread far
from the shore, even into very elevated places, exposed to cool and
dry winds, as in Spain at Medina-Sidonia, at Carlotta, and in the
city of Murcia. That variety of phenomena which the same epidemic
exhibits, according to the difference of climate, the union of
predisposing causes, its shorter or longer duration, and the degree
of its exacerbation, should render us extremely circumspect in
tracing the secret causes of the American typhus. M. Bailly, who,
at the time of the violent epidemics in 1802 and 1803, was chief
physician to the colony of St. Domingo, and who studied that
disease in the island of Cuba, the United States, and Spain, is of
opinion that the typhus is very often, but not always, contagious.
Since the yellow fever has made such ravages in La Guayra,
exaggerated accounts have been given of the uncleanliness in that
little town as well as of Vera Cruz, and of the quays or wharfs of
Philadelphia. In a place where the soil is extremely dry, destitute
of vegetation, and where scarcely a few drops of water fall in the
course of seven or eight months, the causes that produce what are
called miasms, cannot be of very frequent occurrence.
Enter page number
PreviousNext
Page 313 of 407
Words from 162325 to 162862
of 211363