Transactions of the Epidemiological Society of London Volume 13 (Paperback)

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: THE AERIAL CONVECTION OF SMALL-POX FROM HOSPITALS. By JOHN C. McVAIL, M.D., F.R.S.E. (Read: January ITth, 1894.) In opening the discussion on the possible influence of small-pox hospitals in aerially conveying the disease to surrounding population, let me state in limine that my purpose is rather to review existing knowledge than to adduce new facts, unless, indeed, some facts to which I wish to draw attention are so very old as to be entirely new to any of the members of the Epidemiological Society. For it is a trite saying that history repeats itself, and even in regard to the discussion of this subject the saying holds true. A century ago, the celebrated Dr. Haygarth of Chester, and Dr. Waterhouse, Professor of Physic in the University of Cambridge in New England, had a lengthened controversy on this very question, and some of the points then raised are not without interest to us in the present day. Haygarth was the author of A Plan to Exterminate the Small-pox, the plan consisting of small-pox inoculation plus isolation. But the isolation he advocated was not necessarily by means of hospitals. He held that the disease could not spread aerially from one room to another in the same house, and that as to transmission through the open air, in moderate cases, a distance of a foot and a half might be looked on as the limit, and that the infection of fevers was " confined to a much'narrower sphere"much narrower, that is to say, than a radius of 18 inches. In support of his views he cited experiments (which, he said, " must strike every reader of sound sense with irresistible conviction") in which moist small-pox matter had failed at this distance, entirely forgetting that only dry matter might be expected to be disengaged from its source and carried atmospherically. At t...