The mode of infection and duration of the infectious period in scarlet fever / by Charles V. Chapin.

  • Chapin, Charles V. (Charles Value), 1856-1941.
Date:
1909
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: The mode of infection and duration of the infectious period in scarlet fever / by Charles V. Chapin. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by the Augustus C. Long Health Sciences Library at Columbia University and Columbia University Libraries/Information Services, through the Medical Heritage Library. The original may be consulted at the the Augustus C. Long Health Sciences Library at Columbia University and Columbia University.

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    some instances may be retained for months, and often this infectivity seems to be connected with a chronic rhinitis. Scarlet fever seems to be as much a local disease of the throat as is diphtheria. The eruption in scarlet fever appears much more likely to be the result of a toxemia, than to an actual invasion of the skin by the parasite, as is the case in smallpox. It will be more convenient to consider the duration of infectivity first, and modes of infection afterwards, and as a preliminary step we may inquire as to the duration of incubation, for without some knowledge of this, it is difficult to determine what period of the disease is infectious. The word incubation as here used, merely means the time which elapses between the implantation of the infectious material and the development of the initial symptoms. It is true, incubation carries with it the idea that the virus of the disease must of necessity have a more or less definite interval in which to multi- ply and perhaps pass through a certain portion of a more or less complicated life cycle. But in a number of infectious diseases, such as diphtheria, it is known with a fair degree of certainty that this is not so. In some cases as soon as diphtheria bacilli are planted on a mucous surface they begin to proliferate and produce toxins, and probably if our vision were acute enough could be seen to cause tissue changes within a remark- ably short time. Certainly quite marked pathological