登入選單
返回Google圖書搜尋
The Miasma
Joseph Robins
其他書名
Epidemic and Panic in Nineteenth Century Ireland
出版Institute of Public Administration, 1995
主題History / Social HistoryMedical / EpidemiologyMedical / Health Care DeliveryPolitical Science / General
ISBN187200282X9781872002828
URLhttp://books.google.com.hk/books?id=Eg7bAAAAMAAJ&hl=&source=gbs_api
註釋During the early 19th c. it seemed at times as if the entire population of Ireland was on the move. Hunger and terror cast them on the roads but it was epidemic disease that swept them away. A disastrous outbreak of typhus in 1816-1819 killed tens of thousands as did the first appearance of cholera in Ireland in 1832. Both diseases combined in the 1840s to intensify the calamity of the great famine. Fear and panic were the common reaction. Towns were deserted as families fled for safety into the countryside. Workhouses and soup kitchens helped the spread of the disease among the huge numbers seeking shelter and food. Many left the country forever bringing with them the dreaded 'Irish fever'. They died in their thousands on the way, on board the 'coffin ships', in the quarantine stations on the North American coastline, in the squalor of the British and American cities where they sought a new life. For centuries medical men decried the notion that epidemic disease was contagious, that it might be spread by minute unseen organisms. Instead they blamed foul vapours in the atmosphere which somehow combined to form a deadly, indiscriminate miasma. Meanwhile government remained rooted to the belief that poverty and illness lay outside the remit of the ruling classes: social conditions were allowed to deteriorate, destroying the capacity of the poor to resist. To the great mass of the people the horrifying symptoms and huge mortality seemed like divine wrath- or diabolical possession. There was no escape, nothing to do but flee. This book uncovers a nation's fear in the face of catastrophic disease that was beyond its comprehension. It describes the disarray of the doctors and the conflicting theories about how disease spread. It traces, in the Irish context, the impact of Pasteur's discovery of germs, the work of the early public health reformers and the growing realisation that the answers to epidemic disease lay in the area of public and personal hygiene. The understanding of the transmission of disease led to the development of sanitary services, one of the great social advances of modern times. -- Publisher description.