A letter addressed to His Excellency the Right Honorable General the Earl of Chatham, K. G., governor of Gibraltar &c., relative to the febrile distempers of that garrison / by W.W. Fraser, Esq., inspector of hospitals and medical superintendant of quarantine at Gibraltar.

  • Fraser, W. W. (William Wemyss)
Date:
1826
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: A letter addressed to His Excellency the Right Honorable General the Earl of Chatham, K. G., governor of Gibraltar &c., relative to the febrile distempers of that garrison / by W.W. Fraser, Esq., inspector of hospitals and medical superintendant of quarantine at Gibraltar. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by King’s College London. The original may be consulted at King’s College London.

    11/68 (page 3)
    ( 8 ) In soliciting your Lordship's consideration of these mat- ters, I may premise that I have witnessed the febrile dis- orders of Gibraltar, both previously and subsequently to the epidemics of I8l3and 1814, as well as in those years, whilst epidemics in point of mortality, scarcely surpassed in history, have for the last eight years surrounded this station;—and although I was not a personal observer of the last of these dreadful calamities, yet, from the vicinity of the occurrences, from an official access to the most certain reports, and hear- ing these discussed at the time and almost upon the spot, I have had as good an opportunity of appreciating facts as may have fallen to the lot of others. At the same time, I beg to state, that I by no means intend here to prolfer a formal detail of the epidemic visitations of Gibraltar, and still less, of those which have devastated surrounding provinces or kingdoms. For a century after Gibraltar became a British possession, we find little notice taken of it in regard to health. We are told by Munro, that Fevers and Fluxes occasionally pre- vailed. Scurvy at one time ravaged the Garrison, and official records shew that newly raised troops occasionally suffered much from residence in this climate. In 1804, when it may be confidently asserted the know- ledge of this fever was in a more imperfect state than at present, a most alarming malady appeared. It was at first looked upon as a more severe grade of the ordinary inflammatory fever of the station ; but running a course of unprecedented attack and mortality, and when every Civilian in the place, except twenty-eight individuals, out of a population of about nine thousand, had been sub- jected to this scourge, when nearly one half of this popula- tion had been buried, and when every family was clad in mourning and filled with dismay—the disease was, at length, acknowledged to have been malignant and treacherous. These designations were tardily used by those who had mamtained this Epidemic to have been only an extension of the inflammatory fevers of the Garrison; and they seem to have been forced upon them by the mortal issue of the fever, and their own individual circumstances. The treacherous nature of the malady is indeed charac- teristic; and accordingly we find Doctor Jackson speedily applying this term to the Epidemic on his visit to Cadiz in