Fantasy Football Challenge - Football Fanatics Library

Fantasy Football Challenge - Library of Books for Football Fanatics

Fantasy Football Challenge presents
Popular Science Monthly

25 of 119

"Chronicle" (1571), was given to this disease to distinguish it from the Great Pox or syphilis, the French disease, or Morbus Gallicus which attained the proportions of an epidemic in Europe about 1494. The expression "The Pox" in the older medical literature always refers to the Lues Venereal The word "pox" is the plural form of pock; the spelling "pox" is phonetic; "pocks" is the correct form.[1] [1] Thus the following expression in Galt's "Annals of the Parish" is justified--"My son Gilbert was seized with the smallpox and was blinded by THEM for seventeen days." Smallpox is unquestionably a highly infectious or communicable disease, and in the language of a past day, there is a virus or poison which can pass from the sick to the unaffected; when this transference occurs on a large scale we speak of an epidemic of smallpox. As Sir William Osler truly says, "It is not a little remarkable that in a disease, which is rightly regarded as the type of all infectious maladies, the specific virus still remains unknown." The same, however, is true of the common diseases of scarlatina, measles and chickenpox. Of some diseases, the virus is a bacillus or coccus, excessively minute fungi recognizable only under the microscope; but the bacteriologists are now beginning to speak of viruses so impalpable that they, unlike ordinary bacteria, can go through the pores of a clay filter, are filter-passers, that is are of ultra-microscopic dimensions. Some authorities conjecture that the virus of variola belongs to the group of filter-passers. The virus of smallpox, however, is very resistant and can be carried through the air for considerable distances; it clings for long periods to clothes, books, furniture, etc. I shall not now digress to give the clinical details of a case of smallpox; the eruption may be slight or it may be very extensive. It occurs in three forms, discrete, confluent and hemorrhagic. The most dangerous form of smallpox is the confluent, in which the face and arms particularly are covered with large pustular areas of a most disfiguring appearance. The disease called chickenpox, or varicella, has no relationship to smallpox and does not protect from it, nor does smallpox protect from chickenpox. HISTORY OF SMALLPOX There seems very little doubt that the home of smallpox was somewhere on the continent of Africa, although it is true that there are traditions pointing to its existence in Hindustan at least 1000 B.C. One Hindu account alludes to an ointment for removing the cicatrices of eruption. Africa has certainly for long been a prolific source of it: every time a fresh batch of slaves was brought over to the United States of America there was a fresh outbreak of smallpox.[2] It seems that the first outbreak in Europe in the Christian era was in the latter half of the sixth century, when it traveled from Arabia, visiting Egypt on the way. The earliest definite statements about it come from Arabia and are contained in an Arabic manuscript now in the University of Leyden, which refers to the years A.D. 570 and 571. There is a good deal of evidence that the Arabs introduced smallpox into Egypt at the sacking of Alexandria in A.D. 640. Pilgrims and merchants distributed it throughout Syria and Palestine and along the north of Africa; then, crossing the Mediterranean, they took it over to Italy. The Moors introduced it into Spain whence, via Portugal, Navarre, Languedoc and Guienne it was carried into western and northern Europe. The earliest physician to describe smallpox is Ahrun, a Christian Egyptian, who wrote in Greek. He lived in Alexandria from A.D. 610 to 641. The first independent treatise on the disease was by the famous Arabian physician, Rhazes, who wrote in Syriac in 920 A.D., but his book has been translated into both Greek and Latin. The first allusion to smallpox in English is in an Anglo-Saxon manuscript of the early part of the tenth century; the passage is interesting--"Against pockes: very much shall one let blood and drink a bowl full of melted butter; if they [pustules] strike out, one should dig each with a thorn and then drop one-year alder drink in, then they will not be seen," this was evidently to prevent the pitting dreaded even at so early a date. Smallpox was first described in Germany in 1493, and appeared in Sweden first in 1578. [2] Osler thinks the pesta magna of Galen was smallpox; Marcus Aurelius died of it. The contributions of Sydenham, the English Hippocrates, to the knowledge of smallpox, are classical. Throughout the Middle Ages, owing to the very crowded and unsanitary state of the cities of Europe, smallpox was one of the various plagues from which the inhabitants were never free for any length of time.[3] Leprosy, influenza, smallpox, cholera, typhus fever and bubonic plague constituted the dreadful group. In most countries, including England, smallpox was practically endemic; an attack of it was accepted as a thing inevitable, in children even more inevitable than whooping-cough, measles, mumps or chickenpox is regarded at the present time. There was a common saying--"Few escape love or smallpox." In the eighteenth century so many faces were pitted from severe smallpox that it is said any woman who had no smallpox marks was straightway accounted beautiful. Very few persons escaped it in either the mild or the severe form in childhood or in later life. [3] England was by no means exempt, but it was not infection in the modern sense that Shakespeare meant when he wrote-- "This England, This fortress, built by Nature for herself Against infection and the hand of war." Now it is characteristic of a microorganic disease that a person who has recovered from an attack of it is immune from that disease for a longer or shorter time, in some cases for the remainder of life. This is, luckily, as true of smallpox as of any of the other acute infections. We do not now need to enquire into the theory of how this comes about; it is a well-recognized natural phenomenon. The modern explanation is in terms of antigens and anti-bodies and is fast passing from the stage of pure biochemical hypothesis into that of concrete realization. Persons who have recovered from smallpox rarely take it a second time; the few who do, have it in a mild form.

25 of 119 pages. Go to page:

Go to this Book's Directory Page