CHAPTER VII.
MALIGNANT FEVER.
A vast proportion of the most virulent diseases to which the human race is subject in almost all parts of the world, but more especially in tropical regions, is produced by the action of effluvia arising from decomposing dead animal and vegetable matter on the surface of the earth, and incorporated with the soil. These effluvia are the immediate instrument by which thousands of our fellow men are annually deprived of existence, the career of the young and the robust is abruptly stopped, never again to be renewed. Malignant fever is the disease, by which death is occasioned from these effluvia; and this fever assumes forms, characters, and titles, various and manifold. It ravages in almost every country within the tropics, and in many situations it annually commits the most dreadful havoc—cutting down so rapidly that the ordinary forms of burial cannot be observed. Whole communities suffer, the inhabitants of a particular tract of country are sometimes almost extirpated, and to visit some countries is almost to incur death from pestilence, so near to certain is attack, and its destructive character is so uniform.
The average duration of life in many countries is extremely low, chiefly on account of the wasteful career of that scourge, under its various characters and designations; and it is not saying too much that there the number of deaths is four times as great as occurs in our own happy country.
In those regions in which malignant fever prevails so much, almost every inhabitant at one period of his life, sooner or later, is afflicted with it. If he survive he is more fortunate than thousands of those who lived beside him; but his health is often deteriorated, he is often deprived of that vigour and elasticity both of mind and body, which spring from a sound constitution, and he not unfrequently lingers under the sufferings of chronic disease till his life is gradually though slowly exhausted; unless, indeed, as often happens, it is suddenly terminated by a fresh attack of the active pestilence.
“Almost every territory in which it (malignant fever) has committed its ravages has given it a new name. It is as gorgeously arrayed with titles as the mightiest monarch of the East. From the depredations it has committed in the West Indies, and on the American coast, it has been called the St Domingo, Barbadoes, Jamaica, and American fever; and from its fatal visitations on the Guinea Coast, and its adjoining islands, the Bulam fever. In British India it is distinguished by the name of Jungle fever, and still farther to the east by that of Mal de Siam. Nearer home, in the lowlands of Hungary, and along the south of Spain, it is called the Hungarian or the Andalusian pestilence. From its rapid attack on ships’ crews, that are fresh to its influence, the French denominate it Fievre Matelotte, (fever of sailors) as the Spanish and Portuguese call it vomito Prieto or black vomit, from the slaty or purplish and granular suburra (grounds) thrown up from the stomach in the last stage of the disease; while, as its ordinary source is moist lands, it has frequently been named Paludal Fever.”[6]
Footnote 6:
Good’s Study of Medicine, vol. ii. p. 145.
This fever is severe with new settlers in these countries. Persons visiting places in which it is endemic, during its severity almost necessarily suffer, but sometimes they escape with a slight attack, in which case they are said to have had a “seasoning fever.” The pestilential vapours may be carried to a great distance, by winds and currents. Instances have already been given where districts are immediately rendered unhealthy upon the visitation of a wind which has passed over an unhealthy swamp at a distance. Many instances are also well known where ships, riding at the distance of a league from an unhealthy coast, have had their crews affected with the distemper, on the vapours being sent among them by the wind coming off that direction. The British navy is, alas, too familiar with instances of ships being visited by that pestilence when lying off the coast of Africa, where, too, no direct communication had been maintained. The most appalling mortality occurs in these cases; it is not unusual during the short period a ship remains on that station for the whole officers and crew to be swept away in one general tide of death, and it not unfrequently happens that, after the short space of three years, the ordinary time of service, that when a ship returns to England, she has not a hand on board she carried out—but is manned with a crew that has succeeded one which had, in its turn, taken the place of that which danced in joy, and looked all gallantry, only a few short months before, when with hearty huzzas they left their native land, and committed themselves to their bark and to the buoyant billows. At the time of the expedition to Walcheren a disastrous state of health prevailed among the soldiery in Holland, in consequence of vitiated air and other forcible adjuvants;—the pestilential vapours which arose from the soil were borne by the winds to the ships riding at a distance, and there fever failed not to manifest itself with its usual severity.
The actual amount of mortality produced by pestilential effluvia from the soil has never been accurately calculated in those countries where they are most severe. No bills of mortality or registers of deaths are kept, as in this country, in connection at least with the natives. But enough is known to shew that the amount is prodigious.
Tables are kept of the deaths occurring among the soldiers belonging to this country, serving on foreign stations, and they amply shew that the mortality is frightfully greater in those countries infested with these effluvia, and with the diseases which these effluvia are wont to excite, than at home—and as they are the chief agency of an unwholesome character, known to prevail in these regions, it is not unfair to attribute to them, in a general manner at least, a very great proportion of the excessive mortality.
The following extract, from an official return, will shew the greater mortality among the military when serving in the British Colonies than when stationed at home—
_Official return of the mortality among officers and soldiers in the several British Colonies, chiefly for the seven years from 1820 to 1826, shewing the annual deaths out of ten thousand men._
Great Britain (1824 and 1826), out of 10,000 there died per annum, 144 Mauritius, 240 Madras Civil Service in 1820, 600 Ceylon, soldiers on the island, 1328 West Indies, 701
Such is the fearful mortality which occurs among our soldiers stationed in some of our colonies, where effluvia of a pestilential character exhale from the ground. In Ceylon, where terrestrial effluvia are known to prevail, the number of deaths of our soldiers is more than nine times that which occurs among those who are stationed in Great Britain.
The immediate cause of that frightful mortality is the malignant fever, the chief agent in whose production, again, is the pestilential atmosphere, rendered such by terrestrial effluvia, and not by the presence of specific contagious poisons, as defined at page 105, assisted, perhaps, by other hurtful influences, such as, the intemperate habits which new comers in those colonies frequently adopt, the great heat of the climates, operating with particular force upon those accustomed to the more temperate climate of England.
This pestilential fever, the product of effluvia from the soil, commits such mortality among our gallant soldiery, as throws into insignificance the carnage attendant on active warfare, as renders that, even in the field of battle, comparatively of little moment.
Men in action may fall fast around; whole lines, nay columns of living humanity, its boldest samples, in one brief moment may be hewn down; still, as such carnage can last but a few hours of the day only, or, if protracted, a few days at most, the work of death is inconsiderable, compared with that effected by pestilential effluvia in many situations, operating both night and day, from day to day, and from year to year, unceasingly.