French Observations of Disease and Drug Use in Late Eighteenth-Century Cairo

Jw, Estes; Kuhnke, L

doi:10.1093/jhmas/39.2.121

Cited by 12 publications

(8 citation statements)

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“…These data were published as a table in a book by the chief medical officer Desgenettes [30] which is summarized in figure 1 and the full curated data are reproduced in electronic supplementary material, table S1. A gap in the data in the Spring of 1800 was previously attributed incorrectly to the Syrian expedition of 1799 [35] but was in fact due to a revolt in Cairo at the time of the battle of Heliopolis. In the winter of 1799–1800, a significant increase in the number of deaths is seen among children only, which was caused by an epidemic of smallpox [30,32].…”

Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…After exclusion of 1801 due to the plague outbreak, the mean number of reported deaths was 18.81 per day or 6866 per year. The exact size of the population of Cairo at the time is unknown, but based on observations made by scientific members of the French expedition was estimated to be around 250 000 inhabitants [ 23 , 35 , 45 ]. Dividing this estimate of the population size by the mean number of annual deaths results in an estimated life expectancy at birth of 36.4 years.…”

Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Model-based analysis of an outbreak of bubonic plague in Cairo in 1801

Didelot

Whittles

Hall

2017

J. R. Soc. Interface.

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Bubonic plague has caused three deadly pandemics in human history: from the mid-sixth to mid-eighth century, from the mid-fourteenth to the mid-eighteenth century and from the end of the nineteenth until the mid-twentieth century. Between the second and the third pandemics, plague was causing sporadic outbreaks in only a few countries in the Middle East, including Egypt. Little is known about this historical phase of plague, even though it represents the temporal, geographical and phylogenetic transition between the second and third pandemics. Here we analysed in detail an outbreak of plague that took place in Cairo in 1801, and for which epidemiological data are uniquely available thanks to the presence of medical officers accompanying the Napoleonic expedition into Egypt at that time. We propose a new stochastic model describing how bubonic plague outbreaks unfold in both rat and human populations, and perform Bayesian inference under this model using a particle Markov chain Monte Carlo. Rat carcasses were estimated to be infectious for approximately 4 days after death, which is in good agreement with local observations on the survival of infectious rat fleas. The estimated transmission rate between rats implies a basic reproduction number R0 of approximately 3, causing the collapse of the rat population in approximately 100 days. Simultaneously, the force of infection exerted by each infected rat carcass onto the human population increases progressively by more than an order of magnitude. We also considered human-to-human transmission via pneumonic plague or human specific vectors, but found this route to account for only a small fraction of cases and to be significantly below the threshold required to sustain an outbreak.

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Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Model-based analysis of an outbreak of bubonic plague in Cairo in 1801

Didelot

Whittles

Hall

2017

J. R. Soc. Interface.

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“…16 From these investigations, we know at least 77 major plague years were reported before the nineteenth century. 17 Between 1800 and 1844 alone, there were plague epidemics in Egypt in 21 of the 44 years.…”

Section: Anglo-french Conflicts and Disease In Egyptmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…5 Carlo Cipolla, Fighting the Plague in Seventeenth-Century Italy (Madison, 1981); Gunther E. Rothenberg, 'The Austrian Sanitary Cordon and the Control of the Bubonic Plague: 1710-1871', Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences, 28 (1973), [15][16][17][18][19][20][21][22][23][24][25][26]; Anne Hardy, "Cholera, Quarantine and the English preventive System", Medical History, 37 (1993), 250-269. 6 Krista Maglen, "'The First Line of Defence': British Quarantine and the Port Sanitary Authorities in the Nineteenth Century", Social History of Medicine, 15 (2002), 413-428. 7 Peter Baldwin, Contagion and the State (London,1999), p. 93. 8 Maglen, "'The First Line of Defence'".…”

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confidence: 99%

‘An Egyptian Infection’: War, Plague and the Quarantines of the English East India Company at Madras and Bombay, 1802

Nair

2009

Hygiea

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ork on the history of quarantine in South Asia has recently been prolific, but has tended to focus on the period after 1858, when the administration of the British territories in the Indian subcontinent was officially handed over from the English East India Company (EEIC) to the British Crown.1 There is justification for this emphasis, for maritime quarantine would become one of the most important aspects of colonial medical policy in India with repercussions for both the British and the Indians.2 However, well before 1857, the EEIC had gained political and economic control over much of South Asia and had established a substantial administrative infrastructure to govern these territories. In addition, EEIC ships plied a regular and multi-million pound trade in tea, calico, chinaware and drugs between many ports of the world, including its Indian holdings. 3 In the face of the considerable volume of sea traffic, it is very likely that the EEIC administration in India were faced with the threat of infectious disease arriving by sea and subsequently confronted with the necessity of taking some measures against such a threat. This paper is a study of one such occasion -it is a transnational account of plague and quarantine policy as pursued by the British in Egypt and in India; highlighting the controversies over the policy of quarantine W

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“…These data are drawn from similar historical works (Dietrich, 1954;Lev, 2002Lev, , 2002b surveys of markets in Egypt (Ducros, 1930;Estes and Kuhnke, 1984;Meyerhof, 1918), Israel Amar, 2000, 2002b), Jordan (Lev and Amar, 2002a) and Syria (Honda et al, 1990;Sanagustin, 1983), and from inventories drawn up in studies of medicinal substances used by ethnic groups-Jewish (Ben-Ya'akov, 1992;Reiani, 1963) and Muslim (Abu-Rabia, 1999).…”

Section: Data Evaluation and Analysismentioning

confidence: 99%