Travels in Turkey, Asia Minor, Syria, and across the desert into Egypt ...

372
MEDICAL JOURNAL,
CASES OF PLAGUE.
CASE I.
A civil artificer, Mace, thirty years of age, was taken, during
the night of the 10th December J 800, with severe rigors, vertigo,
head-ach, and severe pains in the loins, thighs, &c. accompanied
with nausea, and vomiting of green bile. At eight o'clock in the
morning of the 1 1th December I first saw him ; his skin was very
hot, though moist, with a burning kind of feel to the touch ; a
quick and rather firm pulse (120).
He complained of much head-
ach ; the eyes were red ; tongue tinged, rather of a yellow colour ;
great thirst ; the pains of the back and thighs acute. He had had
three stools during the night : an antimonial emetic was immedi-
ately given, and after its operation ten grains of calomel, and a solution
of Epsom salts. The common drinks were to be lemonade
and rice-water ; to eat freely of oranges. The emetic removed
much bile, which gave the patient some sensible relief. The ca-
lomel and salts not having procured any evacuation by stool, the
former was repeated, and a dose of laudanum \^ith antimonial wine
at bed-time, after the evacuations had been procured. He com-
plained of pain in the groin • and there was a small enlargement
in the left
inguinal glands. The pain from this tumor became so
extremely acute, that I was called to him about four o'clock in the
morning of the 12th. It had then swollen to the size of a pigeon's
egg. The bubo was fomented with warm water, and an anodyne
draught given. At eight o'clock in the morning of the 12th,
when I visited the patient, the attendant reponed, that the fomen-
tion had relieved the pain of the tumor, since which he had thrown
up his drinks, and was now fallen into a sleep.
He expired suddenly about nine o'clock, A.M. 12th Decem-
ber.
The bedclothes being removed, many large livid (nearly black)
spots, of the size of a silver threepence, covered the breast, and
other parts of the body.
hi each axillaa there was a bubo of the size nearly of a hen's
egg. The bubo in the
groin was of a dark livid colour. Some
Arabs were employed quickly
to inter the corpse. The very
strongly marked symptoms of plague in this case gave rise to the
utmost
vigilance and precaution to prevent the infection from
spreading. With this intention all the clothes, bedding,
Sec. Sec.