Page:George Archdall Reid 1896 The present evolution of man.djvu/311

Rh nine deaths, most of these resulting from the evasion of needful precautions. Later in the epidemic, when it is said to have been like the plague, and the people, seized with fear, had abandoned their sick, only one death occurred among a number of cases treated in separate rooms with fair attention... The people chose swampy sites for their dwellings, and whether they kept close shut up in huts without ventilation, or rushed into the streams and remained in the water during the height of the illness, the consequences were equally fatal. The excessive mortality resulted from terror at the mysterious seizure, and (from) the want of the commonest aids during illness... Thousands were carried off by want of nourishment and care, as well as by dysentery and congestion of the lungs... We need invoke no special susceptibility of race or peculiarity of constitution to explain the great mortality.'

"But it is not necessary that we should seek in so distant regions and among uncivilized peoples for proofs of the disastrous influence of unfavourable hygienic conditions upon the type of epidemics of measles on a large scale. In the epidemic which prevailed in 1866 among the Confederate troops during the American Civil War, there were 1900 deaths out of 38,000 cases of sickness. In the official report it is stated that 'the disease resembled ordinary measles in adults, except when aggravated by the effects of crowd, poisoning, or other depressing influences'; in two large hospitals the mortality amounted to 20 per cent, of the sick. In Paris during the siege (January 1871), out of 215 of the Garde Mobile who took measles, 86, or 40 per cent., died; and the mortality very nearly reached the same figure among the French troops who returned to Paris after the Italian War, 40 out of 125 cases dying in one hospital (whose sanitary condition was bad), with severe intestinal symptoms. Speaking of the disastrous epidemic of measles in the National Army of Paraguay, Masterman says—'At the beginning of the Brazilio-Paraguayan War, an epidemic of measles swept off nearly a fifth of the National Army in three months, not from the severity of the disease, for I treated about