Volume 1

Handbook of geographical and historical pathology / by August Hirsch ; translated from the second German edition by Charles Creighton.

  • Hirsch, August, 1817-1894.
Date:
1883-1886
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Handbook of geographical and historical pathology / by August Hirsch ; translated from the second German edition by Charles Creighton. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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

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    casual and partly unavoidable misadventures which have led to crowding and insufficient ventilation of the space set apart for the ship’s company and the troops on board. Emergencies of that kind occurred several times within recent date, on hoard the transports bringing back the French troops from the Crimea, in connexion with which Godelier relates an interesting fact.1 Two ships sailed at the same time from Kamiesch; one of them arrived at Marseilles without any mishap, having made the passage in thirty days, while the other, which was fifty days on the voyage and was badly ventilated in the lower hold owing to defective apparatus, had an outbreak of typhus during the last thirty days of the passage, in which 30 out of the 800 on board were attacked. The introduction of typhus on more than one occasion in recent times into European ports by Egyptian ships of war is another noteworthy fact. One of these was the case of the frigate Scheah-Gehaed which came to Liver- pool in 1861,2 another the frigate Ibreimieh, which arrived at Toulon in 1864 ;3 in both cases it was a matter of overcrowding in the extremely filthy ’tween decks, which had not been ventilated during the voyage, the hatches having been battened down owing to rough weather. In the first case, the ship’s company remained well during the passage [except that many of them suffered from dysentery], and the first cases of typhus were in the pilot and others who had boarded the vessel in the Mersey, [among the attendants at a public bath to which the crew had been sent, and among the patients at the Southern Hospital, into which some twenty of the crew had been admitted for various ailments, but not for typhus]. War-typhus.—The history of typhus in war affords fur- ther classical proofs of the influence of overcrowding, in filthy and unventilated spaces, upon the development of the fever. This has happened most often, for obvious reasons, in besieged fortresses ; but it has occurred not unfrequently among the besieging troops as well, as soon as they have sat down before the place, and the weather has caused the soldiers to pack themselves closely in tents. Of moro recent wars, the Crimean and the Russo-Turkish (1878-79) have obtained a melancholy celebrity in this respect. In the Crimean War, it was principally the English troops that suffered during the winter of 1854-55, their hospital arrangements proving insufficient and the commissariat inadequate for an army that was unusually largo for England. 1 ‘Gaz. rned. de Paris,’ 1856, p. 470. 2 Duncan, ‘Transact, of the Epidemiol. Soc.,’ 1862, i, p. 246. 3 Gourricr (see p. 564)-