“‘Here is another hundred acres of land withdrawn from the food-producing area of the country for ever.... In the same sense in which the “Sabbath was made for man, and not man for the Sabbath,” I hold that the earth was made, not for the dead, but for the living. No intelligent faith can suppose that any Christian doctrine is affected by the manner in which, or the time in which, this mortal body of ours crumbles into dust.’”
Sir Spencer Wells in his frequent communications on the subject lays much stress on the fact that such undoubted proofs of natural death are required by the Cremation Society before cremating a body that no murderer or poisoner would think of getting the forms filled up. At the Milan Crematorium a death from poison was actually discovered in this way, when natural death only was believed to have taken place.
FOOTNOTES:
[9] Ovarian and Uterine Tumours: 1882.
[10] Address to Midland Medical Society, Birmingham, November 5, 1884.
[CHAPTER XVII.]
SIR WILLIAM JENNER, BUDD, MURCHISON, AND TYPHOID FEVER.
In no department of medical knowledge has recent progress been more marked than in the discrimination and the tracing of the natural history of the diseases known as zymotic: and no man takes higher rank in this department of investigation than Sir William Jenner. He was born at Chatham, January 30, 1815, being the son of Mr. John Jenner, and educated at University College, London. After qualifying as a general practitioner, he commenced practice and obtained the appointment of Surgeon-Accoucheur to the Royal Maternity Charity. Before long he graduated M.D. at London University (1844), and retired from general practice. His studies in pathology became more and more extensive, and his merits were so far recognised that in 1849 he was elected Professor of Pathological Anatomy to University College, and Assistant-Physician to University College Hospital.
For some years Dr. Jenner had been assiduously studying in the London Fever Hospital, seeking to make a straight path through the many knotty questions then, in debate. In April 1849 he commenced the publication, in the Monthly Journal of Medical Science, of his classic paper on “Typhoid and Typhus Fevers, an attempt to determine the question of their identity or non-identity, by an analysis of the symptoms, and of the appearances found after death in sixty-six fatal cases of continued fever, observed at the London Fever Hospital from January 1847 to February 1849.” In this he states that “with few exceptions, British physicians have laboured to prove that typhoid and typhus fevers are identical. The results obtained by this analysis justify the assertion that they are essentially distinct diseases.... For two years, in distinguishing the two diseases by the eruption alone not a single error has been made, so far as could be proved by examination after death of the fatal cases, or by the progress of the non-fatal cases after their diagnosis was recorded.”
The history of previous investigations and the fluctuations of opinion are excellently given by Dr. Murchison in his great work on the “Continued Fevers of Great Britain,” 1862, 2d ed. 1873. Dr. H. C. Lombard of Geneva appears to have been the first to state positively (in 1836) that “there were two distinct and separate fevers in Great Britain; one of them identical with the contagious typhus, the other a sporadic disease, identical with the typhoid fever of the French.” He failed, however, to point out the distinctive eruptions and other characteristics of the two fevers. At the same period Drs. Gerhard and Pennock in Philadelphia arrived at more definite conclusions, and distinguished the typhus of Philadelphia as being the same as British typhus, the old gaol, camp, and ship fever, so direfully contagious and fatal; while certain intestinal phenomena were invariably found in the other or typhoid fever, which was rarely contagious. The characteristic eruptions and many of the symptoms were also accurately discriminated. These observers were followed by others who with more or less success and emphasis insisted on the same views. Among these were Drs. H. C. Barlow and A. P. Stewart, both of whom read important papers on the subject before the Parisian Medical Society in 1840. In 1841 the celebrated Louis in the second edition of his great work on typhoid fever accepted the view that the English typhus was very distinct from the fever which he had so largely elucidated. Nevertheless many physicians of authority strongly maintained their identity, and the majority of the medical schools taught this doctrine, which could not fail to retard progress. It is obvious how much uncertain and injurious treatment must have existed for a long period owing to the confusion of these two diseases.
In his series of papers published in 1849 and 1850 Dr. Jenner confirmed and extended the distinctions between the symptoms of the two fevers, comparing the selected cases most minutely as regarded previous health, complexion, sex, age, mode of attack, duration, eruption, expression during disease, manner, hue of face, presence of headache, delirium, loss of muscular power, sensation, appearance of the tongue, suffering of pain, appetite, thirst, pulse, cough, and lung symptoms, and many other particulars, and detailed most carefully the post mortem appearances of the diseased action in every organ.