Ryde Social Heritage Group research the social history of the citizens of Ryde, Isle of Wight. Documenting their lives, businesses and burial transcriptions.
RYDE SOCIAL HERITAGE GROUP
Based at Ryde Cemetery Heritage & Learning Centre. Preserving, documenting and promoting the social history of Ryde on the Isle of Wight.
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Could Appendicitis be Contagious?

IW hospitals
IW hospitals

In 1910 the English surgeon Dr Donald Hood caused considerable worldwide interest with his assertion of the infectious nature of appendicitis.

A distinguished surgeon, who has had great experience of appendicitis, has been suggesting in the columns of the Lancet that the complaint is contagious. He points out how much more frequent and severe are cases of appendicitis than they used to be, and how often the members of the same household are seized with it in quick succession, and surgeons are attacked by it after operating on patients suffering from this complaint. It is now suggested that there must be a particular microbe that causes appendicitis, which on this hypothesis is set up by contagion. It seems rather difficult to suppose that there is a microbe which acts only on the appendix, but now that the suggestion has been made, pathologists will be on the look-out for the hypothetical microbe, and if it really exists it should not be long before it is discovered. Unhappily, the surgeons of the day are afforded numerous opportunities of detecting it by the frequency of operations for the removal of the appendix.


 
Source: Isle of Wight Observer 18 June 1910
Photo: www. iowhospitals.org.uk – photo courtesy of Roy Brinton
Poster: commons wikimedia