Leicester and smallpox. : Thirty years' experience. A paper read at the Annual Meeting of the Royal Institute of Public Health, held at Exeter, August, 1902, with additional details as to the cases of smallpox which have appeared during the present year / by Thomas Windley.

  • Windley, Thomas.
Date:
1902
Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

Credit: Leicester and smallpox. : Thirty years' experience. A paper read at the Annual Meeting of the Royal Institute of Public Health, held at Exeter, August, 1902, with additional details as to the cases of smallpox which have appeared during the present year / by Thomas Windley. 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.

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    sure whether even down to the present time we are not looked upon as the chief culprits. I have depicted the state of the case as it stood with us in Leicester in the years 1872 to 1877. The question was what should we do, and this leads me to deal with what was for some years spoken of as “The Leicester Experiment,” or the “Leicester System of Dealing with Smallpox.” At the time this was begun our then Medical Officer of Health, the late Dr. Johnston, was a firm believer in vaccination, but, as I have said, neither he nor we had anything to do with the enforcement of the vaccination laws. He was, however, responsible for advising us as to the best method of treating smallpox whenever it should arise. What he advised was the immediate removal of cases of smallpox to hospital, the closing and disinfecting of infected houses and bedding, where a case had occurred, and the taking of persons who had been in contact with the patients into hospital quarantine for a fortnight. On this I cannot do better than quote from the doctor’s own words. In his Health Report for the year 1877 Dr. Johnston said:—“As the plan which I adopted in the removal of these cases smallpox) is novel, and may be found useful by Officers of Health in other towns for preventing the spread of the disease, I may be pardoned if I again draw attention to it. In any house where a smallpox case occurred I endeavoured to impress the inmates with the fact that the removal of all the members of the family to the hospital was the best course to adopt, not only as regarded their own individual welfare, but also that of the town at large. And I am glad to say that all complied with my request, left their infected habitations, and became inmates of the hospital. Altogether 22 unaffected cases were thus admitted into quarantine, and of these three after admission sickened. The first in 48 hours, the second in 72 hours, and the third on the 12th day. All these cases must have been infected before admission, as smallpox appears on the skin on the 14th day after the infection of the disease has been received into the system. The epidemic had got firm footing in the town, as it expressed itself in no less than six