Health and Beauty

1925

Smallpox Quotes

"This child, although living in the same room with the patients at the Pest House, had not acquired the smallpox, after being exposed to it all of the time for a period of six weeks; yet upon the fifth day after returning home, this child acquired the initial fever. I then examined their house and found it to be literally alive with bedbugs."---CHARLES A. R. CAMPBELL, M. D.

"Assuming that bedbugs are the only diffusing agents of this loathsome disease, then our present knowledge of its being "air-borne," or of its being transmitted by fomites, must be all wrong, therefore the principal work here mentioned is the demonstration of its non-contagiousness by means of clothing, bedding, hangings --in short, fomites........Anita H., a Mexican child, four years of age, never vaccinated and who had never had the disease, was taken to the pest house, where she took a baby out of the crib and played with it about four hours, hugging and kissing it and riding it in a perambulator around the grounds; but, although this baby was covered with pustules of smallpox, and although we took no precautions whatever (the girl's mother having agreed to this experiment), the girl did not acquire the disease. P. H., a Mexican, vaccinated in infancy, who freely mingled with the smallpox patients in the discharge of his duties as night watchman at the pest house, keeping up the fires and remaining all night, did not contract the disease. A. C., decidedly strumous, never vaccinated nor had the smallpox, freely mingled with smallpox patients in all of the stages, playing cards with them, eating and sleeping in the infected tents, and has continued to do so for more than two years."---CHARLES A. R. CAMPBELL, M. D.

"The most important observation on the medical aspect of this disease is the caehexia with which it is invariably associated and which is actually the soil requisite for its different degrees of virulence. I refer to the scorbutic cachexia. Among the lower-classes of people this particular acquired constitutional perversion of nutrition is most prevalent, primarily on account of their poverty, but also because of the fact that they care little or nothing for fruits or vegetables. That a most intimate connection exists between variola and scorbutus is evidenced by the fact that it is most prevalent among the poor or filthy class of people; that it is more prevalent in winter, when the anti-scorbutics are scarce and high priced; and, finally, that the removal of this perversion of nutrition will so mitigate the virulence of this malady as positively to prevent the pitting or pocking of smallpox. A failure of the fruit crop in any particularly large area is always followed the succeeding winter by the presence of smallpox"----Charles Campbell MD

"That the pitting or pocking can be positively prevented I am absolutely certain, for in the above number of cases I had only one patient who became pocked and this was done intentionally. In all of the cases of smallpox that have originated here I have always found bedbugs; and where patients suffering with this disease were brought here and placed in premises free from these vermin, the disease did not spread to persons living with the patient. This has occurred in many cases, and in all stages of the disease."----Charles Campbell MD