An inquiry into the propagation of contagious poisons, by the atmosphere

by Somerville Scott Alison

In those suffering under scarcity of food, there is generally experienced great depression of mind, which is hurtful in itself and injurious by preventing sufficient exertions for the maintenance of cleanliness: there is an inability to procure requisites for the purpose, and when, perchance, they are obtained, there is too often too much apathy or supineness to admit of their being used.

That miserable individual who is famishing, who is so unfortunate as to hear his helpless children call for bread, which he, alas, cannot give, who himself is exhausted and sinking with want, is seldom found to be very solicitous about cleanliness.

A mother so situated will, in her misery, amid her actual sufferings, and with the dark yet immediate prospect of further hardships, forget the necessity or disregard its call; of removing impurities from her hut, of retaining the persons and clothes of her family clean—and of washing the furniture, the walls and floor of her pestilence-haunted cabin.

In such a situation, cleanliness is neglected and impurities of all kinds accumulate which emit effluvia, to add to the number of the causes of gradual death impending over a family thus situated.

Let a case be supposed in which disease makes its appearance in obedience to the summons of so many forces, and let the malady be of a low or putrid character, and the patient dangerously ill. This family is unable from depression of mind, and from that exhaustion attendant upon actual want, to give him the requisite attention and assistance, and neither the means of cure are administered, nor is a suitable diet afforded. Effluvia arise, and no means being adopted to remove them, they become highly concentrated, and prove the immediate exciting cause of disease among all around who may be prepared by the operation of other favouring influences for that consummation. The occurrence of typhus fever among the labouring classes of this country, which is observed every winter, but more especially on those occasions when provisions, the necessaries of life, are high in price, when employment is with difficulty obtained, and when the wages are low, sufficiently attests the fact that scanty food is a powerful cause of disease, and one of a widely extended range of action. It is invariably in those years when there is least correspondence between the severity or inclemency of the season, the price of provisions and the means of the labourer that typhus fever commits most havoc. I have had occasion to note the prevalence of an unusual amount of disease, and amongst other forms, that of fever, in winters following partial failures of the crops, and the most satisfactory evidence has been afforded that a large proportion of the sickness was the consequence of high prices, and consequent scanty and insufficient food.

Such great prevalence of disease can be readily accounted for, when it is known that the ordinary amount of the wage of the day labourer does not exceed nine or ten shillings per week. I have heard labourers of the most sober and frugal habits affirm, that if their whole wage were spent in the purchase of oat meal for porridge, and of bread, that there would not be more of those provisions than would barely satisfy their children and themselves.

A scanty and unwholesome diet induces a bad and acrimonious state of the fluids, and leads to many diseases, and among others, to scurvy, which was long a frightful pestilence among our sailors.

Where there exists that tendency to scrophula, which is common in this climate, the relaxing influence of a poor and scanty diet is particularly hurtful, and proves the exciting cause of that hideous disease in all its frightful forms. Scrophula is much connected with a sluggish state of certain organs called glands. These organs are found in all parts of the body, and in health vary in size from that of a pin’s head to that of a bean, but in scrophulous subjects they are found much larger, the smaller being often more than the size of a pea, and the larger being equal to a hen’s egg.

Glands are congeries of vessels in which fluids of various kinds are elaborated, and it is partly from these fluids or those from which they are formed, stagnating in their vessels, owing to want of vital action, that the swelling arises, which is always found in scrofulous subjects.

That sluggish disposition of these parts is generally connected with a languid and lax state of the general system, which is liable to be greatly increased by whatever diminishes the vigour of the body. Few circumstances are better calculated to produce that effect than insufficient food, and hence it is that those diseases whose foundation is a scrophulous taint, are so much promoted in times of scarcity, and among individuals accustomed to a liberal diet when accidentally placed on scanty fare.