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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    during the vesicular state of the disease in these cases, to say whether the vesicles would become pustules, whether, when they became pustules, they would continue prominent, or become de- pressed in their centres ; and whether they would decay by the sixth or by the ninth day. In this variety, though the disease might have been re- garded as chicken-pox in its commencement, it ■was impossible, by any characters with which I am acquainted, to have distinguished it from small- pox, in its termination. This variety may be termed vesiculo-pustular small-pox. In the greater number, however, of cases in this class, the papulae have become more distinctly pustular at an early period of the eruption, and the disease in this form has varied remarkably iu different individuals. In most instances in which the epidemic has from the first assumed the form of distinct small-pox, the appearance of the greater part, or of the whole, of the eruption has been simultaneous ; but in several, particularly in chil- dren, it has come out in successive crops. The pustules have generally been small, varying in size from a pin's head to that of a split pea ; and their figure has usually been regular, unless when they occurred in clusters. In but a small pro- portion of cases of this variety has there been any depression on the centre of the pustules; and even in those cases in which depressions have appeared, they have usually occurred only in particular pus-