Report on the extent of venereal disease, on the operation of the Contagious Diseases Act, and the means of checking contagion : with appendix / Association for Promoting the Extension of the Contagious Diseases Act, 1866, to the Civil Population of the United Kingdom.

  • Association for Promoting the Extension of the Contagious Diseases Acts.
Date:
1868
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Report on the extent of venereal disease, on the operation of the Contagious Diseases Act, and the means of checking contagion : with appendix / Association for Promoting the Extension of the Contagious Diseases Act, 1866, to the Civil Population of the United Kingdom. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by The Royal College of Surgeons of England. The original may be consulted at The Royal College of Surgeons of England.

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    apparently healthy when intrusted to their foster-mothers, thirty-eight subsequently sickened of the disease they had inherited from their parents, and two of them infected their nurses with it*. At the Hospital for Sick Children, 174 patients were afflicted treated in 1866, for the immediate consequences ofvery s™'11, syphilis; how many suffered from consequences remote, but clearly attributable to this cause, the hospital records do not shew. 9. Sir William Jenner, F.R.S. has pointed out inherited au. ease. in his address to the Epidemiological Society, the fre- quency with which syphilis originates disease of the liver, of the kidney, and of the brain ; and how much of the so-called consumption is directly referable to syphilis. Still more numerous are the cases of so-called scrofulous disease in children, really due to syphilis inherited from the parents. “ Syphilis,” he says, “ often “ means death,—death to the contractor of the disease, “ —death to his offspring!.” 10. Dr. Robert Barnes, Physician-Accoucheur of St. Thomas’s Hospital, relates instances l of women infected with this disease, losing child after child, until their prospect of rearing offspring is destroyed. This gentle- man has also mentioned that a midwife was infected from one of her patients, and being herself pregnant at the time, not only lost her child, but had her life seriously jeopardized through this cause. 11. At the Lock Hospital, Mr. Berkeley Hill reports, Respectable x married women that of the female out-patients who attended that insti- suffering from tution during the last three months of 1867, thirty-six per cent, were married women, infected with venereal disease by their husbands, or in a manner wholly devoid of blame to themselves §. * See Appendix, p. 24. + See Appendix, p. 24. \ See Appendix, p. 26. § See Appendix, p. 23.