Ninth annual report of the Local Government Board 1879-80. Supplement containing report and papers submitted by the Medical Officer on the recent progress of the Levantine plague, and on quarantine in the Red Sea.

Date:
1881
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Ninth annual report of the Local Government Board 1879-80. Supplement containing report and papers submitted by the Medical Officer on the recent progress of the Levantine plague, and on quarantine in the Red Sea. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    % REPORT. TO THE RIGHT HONORABLE JOHN GEORGE DODSON, M.P., PRESIDENT OF THE LOCAL GOVERNMENT BOARD. SiK, Medical In the performance of the duty which devolves on the ^repoet.^ Medical Department of the Board of observing foreign epidemic — disease, regard is had in the first instance to the possible influence of epidemics on the public health of the United Kingdom ; but foreign diseases are also studied with the object of enabling the Board to advise other Departments of Government on medical questions. During the year 1879 plague and cholera have been investigated under these aspects. In March, papers relating to the modern history and recent ^^^^g***^^ progress of Levantine Plague were laid before Parliament. They consisted for the most part of reprints of documents prepared in the Medical Department and previously submitted to the Board ; but they included reference to an outbreak of plague that had been reported in the province of Astrakhan in Russia; the first appearance of the disease on Eiiropean soil for 37 years. This occurrence, indeed, was being regarded, at the time when the papers were collected, as matter of danger even to Western Europe; and Medical Commissioners from the chief European countries were despatched to the infected districts on the Lower Volga. In continuation of the memoranda concerning plague thus submitted to Parliament, and the bulk of which bad appeared in the Reports of the Board's Medical Officers for 1875 to 1877, Mr. Netten RadclifFe now records in an appended paper (No. 1), the results of his study of the disease in its still more recent movements. By the help of a variety of documents, among which were the reports of the EngKsh, French, German, and Roumanian Medical Commissioners on the Volga, he has brought the his- tory of plague down to the end of 1879. Accordingly his present report gives a detailed account of the Russian outbreak in the previous winter, and records the progress of the disease in the Assyi- district of Western Arabia. Further, it gives detailed information as to the existence of plague during recent years in Western China, particularly in the province of Yunnan. Chief interest attaches to the history of the outbreak on the