Epidemics

Since we deal with the plague and cholera morbus epidemics in separate articles, we shall speak here only of the measles and smallpox epidemics mentioned above. We do not refer to others that have also occurred on this island because, besides being less important, they have already been noted in the article Diseases, published in this Elucidário.

The book by Dr Julião Fernandes da Silva entitled Carta critica sobre o método curativo dos médicos funchalenses contains valuable information on the measles epidemic that raged in Madeira in the year 1751. ‘All was weeping,’ wrote Dr Fernandes da Silva, ‘where hearts were most tender; all was dread where danger was uncertain; and all was funeral spectacle in the pious bearing of the corpses to their graves’.

While some physicians applied bloodletting and cold medicines and allowed those stricken with measles to drink water, others prescribed the opposite treatment. According to Dr Fernandes da Silva, it turned out that mortality was lower among the patients subjected to the former regimen.

The only physicians who favoured bloodletting were Dr Silva and the celebrated Dr Heberden, who was living in Madeira at the time. If what the said author asserts is accurate, the latter cured more than two hundred people stricken with measles without a single patient being endangered. The stubbornness of some physicians in refusing to give water to the sick, Dr Silva adds, was the sole cause of the many deaths on the island. Of the smallpox epidemic of 1815, Dr Heineken says that it was brought by a ship from Cape Verde and that it claimed about 2,000 lives. At that time, and indeed long afterwards, the value of vaccination was still little known among our people, and this was surely the main reason why the epidemic proved so deadly here. (See Adams and Vaccine.)

The epidemic of 1872 and 1873 claimed 1007 lives; after that of 1815, it was the one that did the most damage on this island. The disease was brought to Madeira by a passenger on the Maria Pia, who had come from Lisbon in October 1872 and was admitted to the Civil Hospital (Hospital Civil). It lasted until the end of 1873 or the beginning of 1874, and wrought great havoc, especially in the municipalities of Funchal, Santa Cruz, Calheta and Câmara de Lobos. Smallpox appeared in Madeira on several occasions after 1873, but thanks to the spread of vaccination and to certain sound measures adopted by the authorities, it never again reached the scale of the earlier epidemics. In 1907 many smallpox patients died in Funchal, but the epidemic was short-lived and never attained the intensity of those of 1815 and 1873. This was because, from a certain point onwards, patients who could not be isolated in their homes were admitted to the Lazareto (‘quarantine hospital’), where physicians and devoted nurses who knew their work gave them care and attention they would not have received at home.