SCARLET FEVER. Synonyms.—Scarlatina; Scarlet Rash. Definition ...

organism as a cause of the contagion, and though several observers
have found, what seemed at first, satisfactory evidence of a specific
germ, closer investigations have revealed their mistakes.
Klein thought he had, discovered the poison to be due to a disease of the
cow. An epidemic of scarlet fever broke out in London in December,
1885, and the outbreak could be traced to the milk supplied by a herd in
Hendon. The cows were affected by a peculiar disease which he believed
to be scarlet fever, and he discovered from the discharges that occurred
from the ulcers on the affected cows, a micro-organism which he
believed to be identical with the micro-organism which he had found in
the blood of human scarlet fever patients.
C. B. Brown's investigation, however, showed that milk from other herds
affected with the same disease did not cause scarlet fever, and that milk
from the Hendon herd must have been contaminated by scarlet fever
existing in the neighborhood. So of other animals that have conveyed
scarlet fever, they have only been the media of conveying the disease
from one person to another.
All that we know positively is, that there is a specific infection, that it is
volatile, minutely divisible, and diffused so quickly that it spreads from
one to another with marvelous rapidity.
It possesses great tenacity and vitality, and may reproduce itself in a
favorable soil after lying for years. Thus Hildebrand's coat is said to
have transmitted the disease eighteen months after it had been in
contact with scarlet fever, while Boech reports a case in which two
children of a physician contracted scarlet fever by playing with locks of
hair which had been cut from the heads of two children who died from
scarlet fever twenty years before, the hair having been enclosed in a
drawer during the interim.
The infection is found in the expired air, the secretions and in the
epidermis. It fastens itself upon the clothing, furniture, drapery, toys,
letters, flowers, hair, in fact anything animate or inanimate that comes
in contact with it. It may be carried in a letter written in the sick-room to
one many miles distant. All that seems necessary to contract the disease
is to come in contact, for ever so brief a period, with the impregnated air
or body upon which the infection is found.
It is probably most contagious after the eruption makes its appearance
The Eclectic Practice of Medicine - PART I - Infectious Diseases - Page 126