The effluvia arising from newly opened graves have been often productive of putrid fever.
The following case will shew that effluvia arising from the remains of a person who died of consumption of the lungs, and not of small-pox, produced that disease, viz. small-pox. When that case occurred, small-pox was prevailing, and doubtless, had there been existing at the time a disposition to putrid fever, that disease, and not small-pox, would have been induced by the effluvia which arose from the grave.
In September 1834, Peter Macawley, about twenty-eight years of age, gardener and grave-digger, was employed in the churchyard of Tranent. While busily digging a grave, he unexpectedly struck a coffin with his spade, and broke it open. The coffin contained the remains of an old woman, who had died of consumption of the lungs, and who had been interred about fourteen months.
There immediately issued from the coffin the most offensive effluvia, which threatened suffocation, and made him feel very unwell.
He proceeded home, and continued throughout the night very poorly, giddy, and uncomfortable. He rose next morning, and although no better, proceeded to the churchyard, gave some directions, and returned home, feeling giddy and unsteady. He was put to bed, and passed a very uncomfortable night.
Called in next morning to prescribe for him, I found him to be affected with severe pain of head, great heat and sweating of skin, and great quickness of pulse. He complained of thirst, could take no food, and was occasionally delirious. On the third day of his illness, pimples appeared over the whole surface of the body, which gradually becoming larger, assumed the form of small-pox. The pocks or pustules did not mature or fill with matter in the usual way, but continued throughout to be flat, and assumed a dark blue or inky colour.
His strength fast declined,—he became very low,—muttered incoherently to himself, and symptoms of a putrid character supervening, and the energies of the system fast failing, he died insensible about the twelfth day of his illness, of the worst form of immature, putrid, confluent small-pox I had ever witnessed.
He was a powerful, well-formed, and laborious man, was in good general health up to the moment of his being affected in the grave,—and it was not ascertained that he had been in a situation to receive infection from any other source.
Vitiated air arising from persons in a state of disease, is found in those situations only where the apartment is close and confined, where the person and clothes are allowed to remain in a state of impurity, where the secretions and excretions are left to ferment; and, in short, where no attention is paid to cleanliness, the removal of respired air, and the introduction of a fresh atmosphere. The production of vitiated air is thus only occasional, while, in the contagious diseases, the specific poisons are produced in every case of their respective diseases, and were they capable of being diffused in the atmosphere, there would be present as constantly an atmospheric contagion.
When vitiated air is produced, its removal can readily be accomplished, as daily experience, and the testimony of Dr Haygarth, given at the beginning of this work, amply prove.