Undulant Fever

Abstract

Undulant fever, in its earlier restricted sphere as Malta or Mediterranean fever, is an instance of a disease whose elucidation is attributable almost solely to officers of the Medical Service of the British Army. Knowledge of a low type of fever with remissions, occurring along the Mediterranean littoral, has been general for many centuries, since the time of Hippocrates. Evidence of this is found in some of the synonyms of the past and present centuries - Malta fever, Mediterranean fever, Neapolitan fever, the Rock fever of Gibraltar, Cyprus fever, the New fever of Crete, and Danube fever. It was first brought prominently to the notice of the medical profession in and after 1854 when cases of a prolonged fever, differing in many essentials from typhoid fever, were observed among the troops engaged in the Crimean War. Many of the British sick and wounded were sent to Malta to recuperate and among the various febrile conditions observed - malaria, dysentery, typhoid, typhus, cholera - was an ill-defined unclassed type of fever, which Marston (in the Army Medical Report of 1863) called Mediterranean gastric remittent fever.