Epidemiology; or, The remote cause of epidemic diseases in the animal and in the vegetable creation / by John Parkin.

  • Parkin, John, 1801-1886.
Date:
1886
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Epidemiology; or, The remote cause of epidemic diseases in the animal and in the vegetable creation / by John Parkin. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine Library & Archives Service. The original may be consulted at London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine Library & Archives Service.

    23/378
    everything that passes outside can be seen within. What, then, must be the feelings of a patient who, while lying in bed, not only hears tlie sound of the hammer, but who also sees every nail driven into his own coffin ? And what must be the effect of such a scene in a disease, in which fear plays so important a part ? My readers can answer the question themselves ; they can readily imagine what the effect would be, if they were placed in the same circumstances.* Such are the results that attend the promulgation of, and the belief in, the doctrine of contagion—results that are worse, a thousand times worse, than the evils that the practice emanating from this doctrine is intended to avert. Were I as strong a contagionist as I am an anti-contagionist, I should blush to avow the fact, on account of the moral and the social evils that this doctrine brings in its train. This system (of quarantine), remarks Sir F. Maitland, cuts up by the root all those feelings of domestic life, which are peculiarly endeared to the mind of man, in a moment of sickness and distress ; rends asunder all the usual bonds of society, and places the unfortunate patient in a situation of the most desolate isolation, at the moment when the only remaining comfort of life exists in the kindness of natural friends and connexions. . . It cannot be astonishing to any man who has seen it, that even the last dregs of hope must expire, before any society can submit patiently to a system of discipline which can be • Eefen'ing to the influence of terror during the prevalence of the sweating sickness in Germany, Dr. Hecker remarks :— It often happened at this time that, amidst a circle of friends, if the sweating sickness was only brought to mind by a single word, first one and then another was seized with a tormenting anguish ; their blood curdled, and, certain of their destruction, they quietly slunk away home, and there actually became a prey to death.—Der englische Schweiss, p. 240. C