Clinical lectures on the contagious typhus epidemic in Glasgow, and the vicinity, during the years 1831 and 1832 / by Richard Millar.

  • Millar, Richard.
Date:
1833
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Clinical lectures on the contagious typhus epidemic in Glasgow, and the vicinity, during the years 1831 and 1832 / by Richard Millar. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by the Francis A. Countway Library of Medicine, through the Medical Heritage Library. The original may be consulted at the Francis A. Countway Library of Medicine, Harvard Medical School.

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    a like cause it is, that it so often attacks the more indigent portion of our operatives, during those periodical suspensions of industry that, of late years, have caused so much distress among that part of our population. In fact, this fever might not inaptly be termed the poor maii!s disease. Accordingly, whenever the price of manual labour sinks so low as not to command the ordinary comforts or necessaries of life, we may then look for typhus, and we will seldom look for it long in vain. By the same reasoning may we explain its almost everlasting presence in our sister kingdom of Ire- land. It is an unhappy truth, that in that country, from want of poor laws—from long-continued misrule, or oppression, aided, perhaps, by some peculiar prejudices or habits among the people, destitution, and mendicity, often proceed to an extreme unknown elsewhere; and the visitations of typhus have accordingly been found proportionably frequent, exten- sive, and severe.* So deeply rooted, indeed, does this plague sary to go to a distance, gentlemen; we need only quote our own ill aired lanes and closses. For further illustration, were such requisite to show the power of poverty in spreading or producing typhus, see Dr. Reid, in Irish Med. Trans. Vol. iii. from p. 548 to p. 556, and from p. 583 to p. 586 In contrast with all this, but in proof of the same etiology, I mention the following striking fact. While fever raged all over Ireland, it never penetrated to one of the different garrisons, those of Dublin, Cork, Limerick, Waterford, Clonmel, Kilkenny, Belfast, enjoying the most complete immunity from the disease. The reason is obvious. Even the privates of our armies are now so well fed and lodged, as to be quite beyond the reach of the grand exciting cause of typhus, those miseries and privations, that pressed so hard, at the period alluded to, on the artizans and peasantry of Ireland. One street of Dublin, Barrack Street, so named from its containing the principal barracks of the Metropolis, furnished more patients to the hospital than any other in the city; j'et, notwithstanding this circumstance, and that it was full of prostitutes, readj'- enough to commu- nicate with the soldiers, yet the infection never reached a single individual within the barrack wall. (^Cheyne in Dub. Hosp. Rep. Vol. ii. pp. 51, 53.) * Examples of extreme and peculiar destitution in Ireland are painfully nu- merous. I shall only mention one or two. In Nicholson's Court, Dublin, an hundred and fifty-one persons were found all huddled together into twenty-eight small apartments. Among the whole multitude could be discovered only one bedstead and one blanket; that is, not quite a single bed and a single blanket to each seventy-five individuals (Dub. Hosp. Rep. Vol. ii. p. 48.) Dr. Grat- tan assures us that from 8th June, 1817, to the end of 1818, seven thousand and four hundred mendicants were registered in Dublin. — (Grattan in Irish Med.