Academic literature on the topic 'Communicable diseases Victoria History 19th century'

Objectives Infectious diseases have tormented humans for thousands of years, and severe outbreaks have led to the devastation of entire communities. Even before globalization, parasites and pathogens traveled along trade routes with their human hosts. The protective clothing worn by physicians during epidemics serves as a powerful historical record chronicling accepted theories of disease transmission and treatments. The materials and designs of modern-day protective equipment reflect the contributions of surgeons to the ways doctors protected themselves and their patients during epidemics. Methods Historical texts and journal articles were reviewed regarding the history, epidemiology, and pathophysiology of epidemics of plague, influenza, and coronavirus. Results The Justinian Plague of the 540s CE was the first pandemic to be fully documented and began the long history of plagues through the Black Death of the Middle Ages. Believing that the etiology was foul-smelling bad air (miasma), doctors protected themselves by wearing dramatic head-to-toe coverings. Heavy boots, pants, long coats, gloves, and brimmed hats were made of leather sealed with animal fat. Most important was the infamous face mask with glass eye coverings and a long beak filled with aromatics intended to purify disease-causing vapors. An appreciation of droplet theory in the 19th century made beaked masks obsolete, replacing them with cloth face masks. Surgeons continued to pioneer the development of gloves and gowns, initially to protect themselves and later to protect their patients. Their outfits were worn by healthcare workers during the epidemics of the 20th century. Similar to the plague doctors, present-day physicians treating patients suffering from COVID-19 don themselves in head-to-toe protective outwear, although heavy leather and beaked-masks have long since been replaced by disposable fabrics and the N95 respirator. Conclusions The evolution of physicians’ protective clothing from the iconic beaked mask of the 17th century plague doctor to the hazmat-esque suits of the COVID-19 pandemic doctor reflects the substantial advancements in the detection, treatment, and containment of communicable diseases. Much of this is due to the dedicated efforts of surgeons to better safeguard their patients as well as protect themselves against diseases contained in bodily fluids.

This thesis contains an examination of infectious disease and its socio-economic relationship with the Victorian population during the colonial and early modern eras (1853 to c.1930) (the study period). This involved interpreting some now obsolete diagnoses, studying disease natural history and engaging in the debate surrounding the decline in mortality rates in the nineteenth century. The study period has proved to be an extremely good model in which to test the effects of various social and economic variables on health at a population level. The Gold Rush of the early 1850s and the resulting waves of boom and bust changed the population demography, economic development, and social diversification and stratification. This will be demonstrated to have had an effect on population health both at the state and local levels. Disease exposure and disease susceptibility were observed to vary substantially over the study period for typhoid and whooping cough: typhoid mortality shifts dramatically from children and older adults before 1870, to young adults after 1870, which is indicative of a change in disease exposure patterns with the urbanisation of the colony; whooping cough mortality patterns reduce in some groups compared to others, indicative of changing susceptibility to the disease. These examples highlight the heterogeneity of factors affecting disease causation for different infectious diseases and therefore the specificity of information that can be drawn from observations of changing disease patterns. It was shown that variation in the natural history of disease also occurred. For Group A streptococcal infections, a scarlet fever epidemic cycle was observed until 1876, from which point on mortality from post streptococcal nephritis increases dramatically. For diphtheria cases, however, the natural history of the disease remained very predictable until medical developments in the late nineteenth century. Like disease causation the factors associated with disease progression are also disease specific. To investigate variation in the natural history of diseases with a more complicated ecology, tuberculosis and syphilis mortality and morbidity were investigated. It was shown that for tuberculosis mortality from pulmonary and extra-pulmonary tuberculosis was negatively correlated for much of the study period. Mortality from congenital syphilis and venereal syphilis also trended in opposite directions, with mortality in children trending higher while syphilis mortality in adults trended lower. The principal findings of this work are how disease-specific the ecological interaction is between parasite and host and how responsive a particular disease is to a historical event (which can be interpreted as an ecological change in behaviour by the host in the parasite host relationship) whilst other diseases may not have any reaction or a completely different reactions to the same historical event. This thesis just scratches the surface of the potential of this data in furthering our understanding of the ecological interaction between parasite and host in the past.