Epidemiology, or the remote cause of epidemic diseases in the animal and in the vegetable creation / With the cause of hurricanes and abnormal atmospherical vicissitudes.

  • Parkin, John, 1801-1886.
Date:
1886
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Epidemiology, or the remote cause of epidemic diseases in the animal and in the vegetable creation / With the cause of hurricanes and abnormal atmospherical vicissitudes. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by The University of Leeds Library. The original may be consulted at The University of Leeds Library.

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    be attacked with fever and cliolera, on encamping for the night in one of the uninhabited districts of this vast continent, and this, too, when no disease existed in the surrounding districts. (4.) Another cause to be taken into account is an improved method of treatment, particularly of dysentery. The old method—that by scruple doses of calomel—having been little better than murderous. We can thus account for the reduction in the rate of mortality in India, irrespective of sanitary reform, which could not possibly have had any influence in the production of this effect. If no beneficial result has been observed in England after a trial of fifty years, the general rate of mortality being greater now than it was previously, it is not likely that a different effect will have been pro- duced in India in a fourth part of the time * Sanitary reform was inaugurated in India by Lord Lawrence, in 1864, the first Koard of Health having been established, shortly before my arrival in Calcutta, in the autumn of that year; but no appreciable effect had been produced in 1871, the average ratio of mortality for the three years, 1861, 1862, and 1863, previous to the inauguration of sanitary reform, having been 24-85 per 1,000; and for the three years, 1869, 1870, and 1871, 23-84, a difference of only one per 1,000. This rate is only what had been obtained previously in India. According to the Eeport of Dr. Henderson, the ratio of mortality in Her Majesty's 48th Eegiment, stationed at Biliary, from December, 1829, to December, 1830, was 22-30 per l,OOO.t There * Dr. Macnamara, late Surgeon-Major, of the Bengal Medical Service, in his reply to Dr. Sutherland's letter, says : I do not know of a single cantonment in Bengal, (excluding the Presidency) in which an efficient system of drainage or water-supply has been introduced.—Lancet, Dec. 11th, 1875. ■{■Madras Quarterly Medical Joxmial, January, 1841, p. 121.