An account of the varioloid epidemic, which has lately prevailed in Edinburgh and other parts of Scotland : with observations on the identity of chicken-pox with modified small-pox : in a letter to Sir James M'Grigor / by John Thomson.

  • Thomson, John, 1765-1846.
Date:
1824
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: An account of the varioloid epidemic, which has lately prevailed in Edinburgh and other parts of Scotland : with observations on the identity of chicken-pox with modified small-pox : in a letter to Sir James M'Grigor / by John Thomson. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by the National Library of Medicine (U.S.), through the Medical Heritage Library. The original may be consulted at the National Library of Medicine (U.S.)

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    upon the eruption in Dr. Hennen's boy. It was the circumstance of Dr. Hennen's viewing the disease in his son as a well marked example of chicken- pox, that led him to think of instituting the experi- ments made in Edinburgh Castle, which produced such interesting results.* In four of the six children inoculated, the erup- tion that followed was at first vesicular; and though it became slightly pustular, it was of shorter dura- tion than the disease usually produced by inocula- tion with the matter of small-pox. In the other two children, the disease, towards its termination, exhibited the appearances of small pox; but when I reflected on the purely varicelloid form of the eruption from which the virus had been taken, and compared the appearances in these children with the descriptions of aggravated chicken-pox given by our best practical authors, I could not permit myself to believe that the disease, even in them, was small-pox; and my unwillingness to admit this was for a short time increased, by the very remarkable circumstance, that the seven persons who first caught the disease, from sleeping in the same rooms with these inoculated children, not fewer than four had previously passed through small-pox. The disease in three of the four men who caught the infection, and who had previously passed