Health abroad : a medical handbook of travel / by C. Harford Battersby ... [and others] ; edited by Edmund Hobhouse.

Date:
1899
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Health abroad : a medical handbook of travel / by C. Harford Battersby ... [and others] ; edited by Edmund Hobhouse. 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.

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    The chief difficulty which presents itself in compiling a book of this kind is one that is not obvious at first sight, viz., that on the whole there is a great similarity between the conditions which are unfavourable to health in various parts of the world, and between the diseases which are in fact chiefly prevalent. There are, on the one hand, certain epidemic diseases, such as the plague, yellow fever, and cholera (the two latter endemic in some countries), which are only widespread at certain times, and which the traveller can best avoid by staying away ; and, on the other hand, there are numerous local diseases, or varieties of disease, too numerous and too circumscribed in their distribution for detailed notice in such a volume as the present. When we come to the diseases with which the traveller is likely to find himself face to face, the question resolves itself into very small proportions—malaria in its various forms and dysentery in tropical climates, and typhoid fever in all climates, forming by far the largest part of the avoidable diseases. Civilisation in many countries, e.g. America, has done much to limit the range of malaria by drainage and tillage, though the first effect of turning up the soil is a virulent outburst of the disease; but wherever it has created new centres of population it has brought its n