On the local origin of the Yellow Fever epidemic of British Guiana : in a letter from Daniel Blair ... to John Davy ... with appended documents.

Date:
[1851?]
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: On the local origin of the Yellow Fever epidemic of British Guiana : in a letter from Daniel Blair ... to John Davy ... with appended documents. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh. The original may be consulted at the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh.

    6/38 (page 166)
    although his brother Richard had, twelve or eighteen months after- wards. He never slept in the bed, or in the same room, in which the young man Cherrington had died. His Indian attendant never had the disease, and the disease never extended among his retinue, nor the other Indians of the interior, although a few Indians about the Sand-hills, who contracted it in town died of it there, and the disease died with them. This exquisite fiction about “ poor Schomburgk,” was retracted and apologised for by Dr. Fraser to Mr. Stutchbury, in presence of Schomburgk, when he next returned from the anterior. What was Sir Robert Schomburgk’s own opinion on the subject? In his “ Description of British Guiana,” published in 1840, he states that “ immediate contact with the sick did not propagate the disease (yellow fever), nor did seclusion diminish it; and that there is no instance known in which it extended to the more elevated places of the interior.” I cannot make out who the lady was, or what the mercantile firm which Dr. Fraser refers to, which was shut up for a couple of weeks, in consequence of the whole establishment being laid up by the pre- vailing malady. The case is very defective in being anonymous. It is singular that in the beginning of the epidemic they should all recover in that house. We come now to the hypothetical. A ship, says the Dr. “arrives, and the captain uses every precaution to avoid having any com- munication with the shipping or shore. This precautionary sort of measure does very well for a week or a fortnight, but at the expiration of that period, the rigorous restrictions he has placed himself and crew under become relaxed, and they steal a visit to see some of their old messmates, who may perhaps be at the time very ill with fever. The visitor sits, has a long yarn with the visited; he returns to his ship,” 8cc. &c. Now this is not only hypothesis, but impossible hypo- thesis, as any one who knows anything of this harbour could at once detect. The ships swing out in the river at cable length; the stream runs at the rate of three or four miles an hour ; the river abounds with sharks; no approach to either ship or shore can be effected, except by the boats, which are entirely under the power of the officers of the ships. In fact, each ship is perfectly isolated, and remains so during the voyage; and whatever yarns the messmates may have with each other, they can have none with their neighbours, except through a speaking trumpet. Again, the Dr. says “an overseer of an estate comes to town with produce to be shipped; he visits some friend’s house where the fever is raging; he returns to the estate, sickens and dies; and his fellow overseers go through a similar ordeal, having caught the infection from him: from this point the fever spreads itself to every family in the district.” This is a mere fancy sketch, no real instance of which, I am sure, could be adduced. It is not