Little Johnny's disease

[kev67]

What was the disease little Johnny suffered from in book 2? Apparently it was a bit like measles but had a longer name. That means it was not small pox. Sloppy says the disease is more dangerous when the spots turn inwards.

When it becomes known Johnny has this dangerous disease, he is taken to a children's hospital, where a doctor says he should have been brought in days before. This surprised me because it was before antibiotics. What sort of effective treatments did hospitals have for infectious diseases?

[OrphanPip]

What was the disease little Johnny suffered from in book 2? Apparently it was a bit like measles but had a longer name. That means it was not small pox. Sloppy says the disease is more dangerous when the spots turn inwards.

When it becomes known Johnny has this dangerous disease, he is taken to a children's hospital, where a doctor says he should have been brought in days before. This surprised me because it was before antibiotics. What sort of effective treatments did hospitals have for infectious diseases?

I didn't know much about this topic but was able to dig up a Phd Thesis written on the subject. From what I read Our Mutual Friend was written at a time in the nascent stages of physicians starting to understand germ theory. The dominant medical belief at the time was still that disease was somehow spontaneous and came from "miasma" or filth in the air or water. Physicians knew enough that living in squalid conditions and drinking dirty water was bad for you. Public health initiatives were focused on waste removal and development of cleaner water sources. They knew enough then that you had to sanitize surgical equipment. They also roughly understood that diseases could be contagious. A short time later Louis Pasteur would prove germ theory in 1870 and demonstrate that small microorganisms were actually responsible for many diseases. Since they didn't yet understand the microbial origin of disease at the time, they often played loose with definitions: references to a "fever" could mean anything from cholera to smallpox. Treatments at the time for pox involved controlling fever and draining/cleaning wounds.

The boy likely had smallpox since they were concerned about isolating him at a hospital. They probably believed the sanitary conditions would be helpful but in actuality it's unlikely they had any truly effective treatments for smallpox. There was also a major outbreak of smallpox in 1862 in London. However, it should be noted that vaccination with cow pox virus was done in England since the 1830s, potentially if they had brought the child before he got smallpox he could have been inoculated with cow pox. This came about because British physicians noticed that milk maids were unusually resistant to smallpox, it was later discovered that scratching someone with a needle dipped in the pus of a cowpox pustule gave people a less deadly form of smallpox. They also understood that smallpox only hit once. Anyone wealthy or middle class would likely have received a smallpox vaccine, all members of the British navy and armed forces were vaccinated.

[Danik 2016]

Very interesting and informative. Could you indicate the title or the link to the Thesis, OP?

[OrphanPip]

Very interesting and informative. Could you indicate the title or the link to the Thesis, OP?

https://ruor.uottawa.ca/bitstream/10...012_thesis.pdf

The smallpox stuff I found by googling the history of smallpox in England.

[Danik 2016]

Thank you very much, OP. As it is available for free I just saved it and I am going to have a look at it later.

[kev67]

This article says it was tuberculosis, but that does not make sense to me as the child had spots. I wondered about smallpox, but someone says it is a disease with a long name. Smallpox is not very hard to remember, but it has a longer name: Variola or variola vera. Maybe little Johnny was not vaccinated. His carer was frightened of ending up in the workhouse, so maybe she distrusted all official health programmes, such as vaccination. Esther Summerson in Bleak House suffered from a disease that appeared to be smallpox. If Dickens wanted to be original in Our Mutual Friend, he would likely have used a different disease.