Chapter VIII (3)

A singular epidemic of dysentery occurred between the 14th and 26th
September, 1853, among the thirty-six inmates of a row of nine
cottages near the village of Hermiston, five miles west of Edinburgh.
Seven children were attacked, of whom six died, and six adults, who
all recovered. Besides these there were three cases among the four
inmates of a cottage about a hundred yards away, and one case in each
of two houses in the adjacent village of Hermiston. Christison found
that a drain which received the sewage or slops of the hamlet was in a
most offensive state, having been choked probably for years, and that
the water of a well near it was foetid. These are the conditions that
have often caused village epidemics of enteric fever in recent times;
but there was no doubt that the disease in this case was
dysentery[1472]. Another asylum outbreak of dysentery occurred in 1865
in the Cumberland and Westmoreland Asylum[1473].

Perhaps the last general prevalence of dysentery was during the Asiatic cholera of 1849, when the house-to-house visitations in Leeds and some other towns brought to light a somewhat surprising number of cases mixed with the more ordinary bowel-complaints of the season.

It is impossible to trace the subsequent history of dysentery in England by the usual statistical means of the Registrar-General’s tables of the causes of death, for the reason that dysentery, a rare and curious disease of all ages in this country, is merged with diarrhoea, one of the commonest causes of infantile mortality. However, it is not likely that any such epidemic outbursts, local or general, as those described for certain years of the 18th and 19th centuries could have occurred without their being otherwise known. It may be safely said that there has been little of it in this country for the last thirty or forty years, except among a few soldiers, sailors or others returned from abroad; in Ireland itself, the immemorial “country disease” has now only a small annual total of deaths.

One of the last experiences of dysentery in an English port was instructive for the relation of the disease to typhus fever.

On 16 February, 1861, an Egyptian frigate, the ‘Scheah Gehaed,’ sent
from Alexandria to be fitted with new engines, arrived in the Mersey.
The only European on the ship was her commander, an Austrian. She
carried 476 men, mostly Arabs, with a small proportion of Nubians and
Abyssinians. Some two hundred were convicts, who had been brought on
board in chained gangs. The passage had been long and stormy, and
attended with much sickness, dysenteric and diarrhoeal; one man died
and was thrown overboard two or three days before the ship reached
Liverpool. The pilot who boarded her was at once struck by the
horrible state of filth of the ’tween decks; he remained two days on
board, and on returning home said to his wife, “This frigate will be
heard of yet.” He sickened in about a week of malignant typhus and
died. Two others who boarded the ship took typhus, of whom one
recovered. There had been no fever on board during the voyage.
Thirty-two of the Arabs or Nubians were admitted to the Southern
Hospital suffering, most of them, from dysentery or diarrhoea. Typhus
fever attacked 17 of the ordinary patients, 2 nurses, 2 porters, 2
house-surgeons and 2 others in the hospital, of whom several died. The
Arabs &c. to the number of 340 were taken in batches of 80 a day to a
public bath, in which they remained three hours. Typhus broke out
among the bath attendants. The whole number of cases of typhus traced
to the ship was 31, of which 8 were fatal. The ship was sunk in the
graving dock in order to clean her[1474].

This is a classical instance of the breeding of typhus from the effluvia of dysentery, of which other instances, on a greater scale, have been given in connexion with the Jamaica expedition of 1655 (in the former volume), the siege of Londonderry and the camp of Dundalk in 1689, the hospitals after the battle of Dettingen in 1743, and the Irish famine of 1846-48.