A succinct account of the contagious fever of this country, exemplified in the epidemic now prevailing in London; with the appropriate method of treatment as practised in the House of Recovery. To which are added observations on the nature and properties of contagion. Tending to correct the popular notions on this subject, and pointing out the means of prevention / By Thomas Bateman.

  • Bateman, Thomas, 1778-1821.
Date:
1818
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: A succinct account of the contagious fever of this country, exemplified in the epidemic now prevailing in London; with the appropriate method of treatment as practised in the House of Recovery. To which are added observations on the nature and properties of contagion. Tending to correct the popular notions on this subject, and pointing out the means of prevention / By Thomas Bateman. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    of the sick, constitute a medium of infection capable of generating fever. The advocates for both these doctrines, therefore, agree in admitting that this infectious product of fever, accumulated and concentrated in the unclean¬ ly and unaired habitations of the poor, where it chiefly originates, becomes a great and formidable agent in spreading the epidemic malady, far beyond the limits to which the predisposing cause would carry it. Number¬ less cases could be quoted from the journals of the House of Recovery in illustration of the progress of fever from individual to in- tactu in homines morbi.” lib. iv. cap. xxx. In an admirable description of a pestilence in the viitli book of the Meta¬ morphoses, Ovid expressly mentions contagion, by which the physicians and attendants suffered: -“ obsuntque auctoribus artes: Quo propior quisque est, servitque fidelius aegro. In partem leti citius venit.” The learned Dr. Mead, in his treatise on the Plague, has cited several passages from Thucydides, and Lucre¬ tius (who, in his picturesque description of the Ignis sacer, has nearly translated the account of the plague at Athens given by the former), and from Galen, proving the antiquity of the knowledge of contagion; and remarks that Aristoile has made it a problem, How the Plague infects those who approach to the sick. Against such evidence it is difficult to conceive how Dr. Maclean can persist in maintaining his erroneous position.