File:Tri-State medical journal and practitioner (1897) (14777968152).jpg

Identifier: tristatemedicalj4189unse (find matches)
Title: Tri-State medical journal and practitioner
Year: 1897 (1890s)
Authors:
Subjects: Medicine
Publisher: St. Louis : (s.n.)
Contributing Library: The College of Physicians of Philadelphia Historical Medical Library
Digitizing Sponsor: The College of Physicians of Philadelphia and the National Endowment for the Humanities

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nation of the trouble finally be-came so great that the unfortunate victims were kept incarcerated in specialbuildings; and it is estimated that at one time there existed no less thanthirty thousand leper houses in Europe. A critical examination of theaccounts and descriptions of thedisease, as it then occurred, will demonstrateto an impartial reader that the trouble was in reality syphilis. Thisreadily explains its rapid dissemination and its ready contagion. Treat-ment being ignorantly applied, the patients neglected and abhorred, also * Read before the St. Louis Academy of Medical and Surgical Sciences. Leprosy—Ohm ann-Dum esn i l. 105 easily explains the ravages which it made and the rapid deaths which fol-lowed in its wake. Those not syphilitic suffered, in a certain proportion,from the bubonic plague, and a very few were probably leprous. On the other hand, we have the curious history of the spread of thedisease in the Sandwich Islands. It is not so many years ago that leprosy
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Fig. i. Tubercular Leprosy, (Mexicau Woman.) was unknown in the islands. A Chinaman affected with leprosy, so theaccount goes, was the original focus, and from him it spread to the natives,and from one to the other with such frightful rapidity that it might be saidwith propriety that these islands are naught but one vast leper colony.Father Damien, the Belgian priest who lived among them for years, finally 106 Original Articles. contracted leprosy and succumbed to the disease. In the case of the Sand-wich Islands there is no doubt of the certainty that the disease is leprosy,and it would seem, at first glance, to be an irrefutable argument in favor ofthe contagiousness of the disease. Careful study and inoculations bycompetent investigators have failed to show that leprosy is contagious, but#it is inoculable with the greatest difficulty and only under special circum-stances. Pure cultures of the lepra bacillus have failed to bring on thetrouble, and perhaps the only method which has b

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