What’s that to me? I. Lettsom.”
He gave away immense sums in charity, he was not so unfeeling as his verse would make him appear.
William Stark (1742-1770) was the earliest writer who distinguished between tuberculosis and scrofula.
Jean Astruc (1684-1766), professor at Montpellier, the oldest of the celebrated French obstetricians, was the author of a work on the diseases of women from the pathological point of view.
Johann E. Wichmann (1740-1802), a scientific physician of Hanover, in 1786 explained the cause of itch as due to the itch-mite passing from one individual to another. He experimented upon himself. Bonomo had, however, discovered the insect in the itch pustules in 1687.
Wichmann suggested the contagiousness of consumption, whooping cough, diarrhœa, and several other complaints.
J. P. Frank (1745-1821) was “the founder of medical police as a distinct department of science.”[1007]
Hospitals.
The condition of the hospitals for the sick in the eighteenth century was scandalous almost beyond belief. Thus, in the Hôtel Dieu of Paris, the mortality at one time was 220 per 1,000; a state of affairs which, however, we surpassed in the present century, when in the British hospitals at Scutari the mortality reached between 400 and 500 per 1,000. In both cases this was due to overcrowding. At the Hôtel Dieu two or three small-pox cases, or several surgical cases, or sometimes even four lying-in women would be packed into one bed. A large proportion of the beds were purposely made for four patients, and six were frequently crowded in.
John Howard (1726-1790), the philanthropist, by his splendid and devoted labours in connection with the reform of prisons, hospitals, and lazarettos, drew attention to the means of preventing the communication of the plague and other infectious fevers. In the words of Burke “his philanthropic spirit led him to dive into the depths of dungeons; to plunge into the infection of hospitals; to survey the mansions of sorrow and pain; to take the gauge and dimensions of misery, depression, and contempt; to remember the forgotten; to attend to the neglected; to visit the forsaken, and to compare and collate the distresses of all men in all countries.” Not the least of his services were those he rendered to the cause of sanitary science and public health.