Miasma

“ If we could have our choice between prevention and cure, should we not naturally take the former?
Indeed, the sources, the causes which generate the typhic miasma, are thoroughly well known to us, and these we can avoid. The developed miasms hang suspended in the air; we may, perhaps, one day destroy them, if not in the outer atmosphere, at least in the stalls and sheds where the animals inhale and absorb them. In fine, if we are powerless to arrest the fell disease when its periods revolve, we may hope at some future time to act with greater efficiency upon it during its period of incubation. ”

“ So tremendous was the miasma generated on one occasion, that 1000 persons were brought out to be buried every day through the Top-Kapousi gate. It is in such places that the plague is never extinguished, but remains always slumbering, till some circumstance calls it into activity. ”

“ When the constitution was not disposed, or had not vigour enough to throw the miasma to the surface in the form of biles, buboes, carbuncles, or blackish spots, the virulence is supposed to have operated inwardly, or on the vital parts, and the patient died in less than twenty-four hours, without any exterior disfiguration. ”

“ Nor do marshy miasma emitted from the earth, mount or diffuse themselves to any considerable distance in the air: the inhabitants at the top of a hill have continued healthy, whilst those situated in a swamp at the bottom, have been infested with intermittents, and remittents. To what distance the contagion of small pox, measles, and scarlet fever extend through the air, I am ignorant: like the plague, the two former have been transplanted to distant regions, in animal bodies, or in polluted porous materials. ”

“ Generally, however, men with robust figures and the hue of health are singled out and presented as examples of the general innocuousness of the offensive miasma generated in the process in which they are engaged. ”

“ The sense of smell in the majority of inhabitants seems to be destroyed, and having no perception even of stenches which are insupportable to strangers, they must be unable to note the excessive escapes of miasma as antecedents to disease. ”

“ For guiding those readers, who are in search of general information, we shall briefly state the principal cases, in which stimulants may be resorted to: 1. In ardent fevers attended with extreme nervous debility, especially those of the malignant kind, where the patient has neither strength to discharge the morbid miasma affecting him, nor to counteract the noxious influence of disease. ”

“ The natives of northern climates are extremely susceptible to the influence of these miasma; that susceptibility is in exact proportion to the latitude of their country: those from the north of Europe scarcely ever escape an attack; the 372natives of Great Britain are nearly as susceptible to the influence of the poison, while persons even from the more northern countries of the United States are more liable to the disease than the citizens of the southern and middle states. ”

“ This gentleman assured him, that “he had seen men, in apparent good health, instantaneously drop down, as if shot by a musket ball, by the sudden action of the pestiferous miasma, and upon duty again in 24 hours, perfectly recovered by the operation of a strong vomit.” Whether or not these men felt any stroke at the instant of their falling we are not told: possibly it might be only a syncope very common in the plague, which took place at the very first invasion. ”

“ Hence, in accordance with the chemical nature and physiological influence of these miasma, they would exert a marked action on the animal economy, and cause diseases among the greater number of those who breathe the infected air. But numerous experiments prove that, as a rule, the air contains free ozone, though in very variable proportions; from which we may conclude that no oxidizable miasm—sulphuretted hydrogen, for example—can exist in such an atmosphere, any more than it could exist in air containing but a trace of chlorine. ”

“ A favourite theory with medical men was, that the evil influence which causes fever, whether in Essex or on the Gambia, by the Scheld or the Niger, was a certain miasma produced by marshes more or less remote from human abodes ”

“ In the investigations made in certain parts of Great Britain, it appeared that in districts where the air is pure the deaths average eleven in one thousand each year; while in localities most exposed to impure miasma the mortality was forty-five in every thousand. ”

“ Sleeping in these forests is very unhealthy. There is a most fatal miasma all through the year, less during the hot months, but very bad during and immediately after the annual rains; and in September and October nearly every soul in the jungly tracts is smitten with fever. ”

“ In truth, it is well known that the cholera of the present day—that much more serious plague—had its origin on the banks of the Red Sea, amidst the infectious miasmata developed near Mecca, where thousands of pilgrims who had died of fatigue and privation, and hundreds of thousands of sheep butchered and religiously offered up in sacrifice, have, beneath a torrid heat, generated the choleraic miasma, which formerly was supposed to be produced exclusively on the banks of the Ganges. ”

“ I was led to observe and record the above effects of the miasmata upon persons in apparent good health, by a fact I met with in Dr. Mitchell's history of the yellow fever in Virginia, in the year 1741. In that fever, blood drawn from a vein was always dissolved. The same state of the blood was observed in many persons who had been exposed [160] to the miasmata, who discovered no other symptom of the disease.
A woman whom I had formerly cured of a mania, who lived in an infected neighbourhood, had a fresh attack of that disease, accompanied by an unusual menstrual flux. ”

“ From such evidence as that already adduced from the Report of the Committee of the House of Commons, but presented in greater extent and strength in the course of the present inquiry—of instances of disease and death occasioned by miasma from badly made and sluggish or stagnant drains that pervade whole towns, it will be seen that it cannot fairly be said that the distrust is not well founded. ”

“ He asserts that plague is only generated at particular seasons, in certain definable conditions of the atmosphere, and when miasma is created by the decomposition of decaying matter; that endemic plague is unknown in countries where proper attention is paid to hygienic precautions; that severe cold or intense heat equally arrests the progress of the plague; that the epoch of its ravages is always one when damp and exposed animal and vegetable substances emit the greatest amount of noxious gases ”

“ The dull eye, and the lowness of spirits, appeared to be the effects of such an excess in the stimulus of the miasmata as to induce depression, while the brilliant eye, and the unusual vivacity, seemed to have been produced by a less quantity of the miasmata acting as a cordial upon the system. More or less of these symptoms frequently continued for two or three days before the patients were confined to their beds, and in some people they continued during the whole time of its prevalence in the city, without producing the disease. ”

“ In Manchester and in several northern districts, it appears that by custom the corpse seldom remains unburied more than three or four days, but during that time it remains in the crowded rooms of the living of the labouring classes. Every day’s retention of the corpse is to be considered an aggravation of the evil; but the evidence is to be borne in mind that the miasma from the dead is more dangerous immediately after death, or during the first and second day, than towards the end of the week. In a proportion of cases decomposition has commenced before the vital functions have ceased ”

“ In stating the opinion that putrefaction singly does not occasion malarious disease, we do not mean to affirm that air highly charged with putrid miasmata may not, in some cases, powerfully impress the nervous system so as to induce syncope and high nervous disorder ”

“ We learn the reason why, in some instances, the fever does not spread from a person who sickens or dies at sea, who had carried the seeds of it in his body from a sickly shore. It is because no febrile miasmata exist in the bodies of the rest of the crew to be excited into action by any peculiar smell from the disease, or by fear or fatigue, and because no morbid excretions are generated by the person who dies. ”

“ An army may encamp with safety on the sea-shore of a pestilential island during one monsoon, when the wind is from the sea, but if the monsoon change, and blow from the interior, sickness invariably follows. Miasma loses its property of producing fever in its progress on the wind, as if it became too volatile to have effect. Localities within one mile of a marsh may be feverish, whereas others five miles distant may be healthy. ”

“ The disease, which was at first confined to Water-street, soon spread through the whole city. After the 15th of September, the atmosphere of every street in the city was charged with miasmata; and there were few citizens in apparent good health, who did not exhibit one or more of the following marks of their presence in their bodies.
1. A yellowness in the eyes, and a sallow colour upon their skin.
2. A preternatural quickness in the pulse. ”

“ He took pleasure in saying unkind, unpleasant things, and said he could not take an interest in any exploration if he did not command it.
"These illnesses are the effects of fever, and a mysterious manifestation of miasma in certain latitudes; for in some tracts we were perfectly well, in other tracts we were mortally sick, and the changes were instantaneous. Cultivation and Civilization will probably wear these effects out, by planting, clearing jungle, and so on. ”

“ What would be the effect of the daily use of a few tea spoonfuls of this medicine in a liquid form, and of frequently washing the body with it, during the prevalence of pestilential epidemics?
The miasmata which produce malignant fevers often exist in an inoffensive state in the body, for weeks, and perhaps months, without doing any harm. With but a few exceptions, they seldom induce a disease without the reinforcement of an exciting cause. ”

“ In the months of July and August, when miasmata are generally local, and float chiefly near to their hot beds, the docks and holds of ships, persons who are affected by these miasmata, and sicken in other parts of the city, never communicate the disease; but after the less prepared and heterogeneous filth of our whole city has been acted on by an autumnal, as well as summer sun, so as to emit pestilential exhalations into all our streets and alleys, the fever is now and then excited in the manner that has been mentioned, by a single person in a whole family. ”

“ Thus an epizootia at the outset, either when it has become general, or when it is at its decline, does not always transmit typhic miasma of the same virulent intensity, nor does it always provoke in the frame a labour of incubation which is invariable. The contagion transmitted from animal to animal living continually in the same stalls or sheds is followed by an incubation more quick and active than that which results from a chance contact in the markets, or from a contagion produced at a distance, by the transmission of the miasmatic effluvium along the public highways. ”

“ The miasmata which induce the plague and yellow fever, when they are not preceded by the usual debilitating and predisposing causes, generally induce the same depression of the system, previously to their exciting fever. Even wounds, and other local irritants seldom induce fever before they have first produced the symptoms of depression formerly mentioned. I shall presently mention the exceptions to this mode of producing fever from contagious miasmata and local injuries, and show that they do not militate against the truth of the general proposition that has been delivered. ”

“ Of course, as with most game, early morning and evening are the best times during which to look for it, and early dawn implies being wet through to above the waist by the heavy dew and the subsequent drying of one's things by the heat of the sun—a pretty certain method of getting fever; evening, on the other hand, means not getting home till hours after dark, and breathing during that period the fatal miasma, which, as soon as the sun sets, begins to rise from all over the great lagoons and dotted plains where this antelope is chiefly found. Inyala-shooting and fever are all but synonymous ”

“ The miasmata which produce malignant fevers sometimes [196] possess so much force, that the least addition to it, even from customary acts of labour, is sufficient to excite the disease. In this case, safety should be sought in retirement, more especially by those persons whose occupations expose them to the heat of fires, and the rays of the sun, such as hatters, smiths, bricklayers, and house and ship carpenters. The wealthy inhabitants of Constantinople and Smyrna erroneously suppose they escape the contagion of the plague, by shutting themselves up in their houses during its prevalence. ”

“ Rheumatism, epilepsy, etc., are caused by the wind blowing upward; colic, pains in the loins, legs, etc., by its blowing downward, It is seldom that a disease runs its course without all of the elements being called into play, water especially, as in eases of dropsy, which is caused by the fire not having sufficient force to dry up the water, as the sun does the mists and fog, and they think that fever and cholera are caused by the invisible mists and vapors that exhale from the ground, miasma. ”

“ At these times, as often as by inspiration we draw into the naked blood miasmata of this kind, noxious and inimical to nature, and we fall into those epidemical diseases which they are apt to produce, Nature raises a fever,—her accustomed means of vindicating the blood from some hostile matter. And such diseases are commonly called epidemical; and they are short and sharp because they have thus a quick and violent movement [39] .”
It was Sydenham’s intimate friend Robert Boyle who worked out the hypothesis of subterraneous miasmata as a cause of epidemic (and endemic) diseases. ”