James Mellis

James Mellis MD (1781–1846) was a Scottish surgeon in the Bengal Presidency of the East India Company. He is now known as an early writer on dengue fever.

Life

He was the son of the Aberdeen brewer James Mellis and his wife Mary Stuart; his sister Mary married the Wesleyan Methodist minister George Douglas and had three children, the eldest being James Douglas (1800–1886), a medical man in Canada.[1][2]

Mellis graduated M.A. at Marischal College in 1799.[3][4] He became a Member of the Royal College of Surgeons in 1802.[5] He served as surgeon on the Indiaman Fame in 1803–4, on station at Madeira.[3][6] In 1806 he was examined for his degree of M.D. at Marischal College, and that year joined the Bengal Army, with rank Assistant Surgeon.[3][7][8]

Mellis was ranked as Surgeon in 1818.[3][9] He attended the missionary William Carey in 1823.[10] Around 1830 he was attached to the 9th Regiment Native Infantry, posted at Neemuch, and took a furlough period.[11] In 1837 he became a Superintending Surgeon, and remained posted at Neemuch.[12]

James Mellis departed from Bombay on 1 April 1845 for Suez on the Cleopatra with his wife and a child.[13] He died on 17 March 1846 at 169 Prospect Place, Maida Hill, London.[14]

1824 Calcutta dengue epidemic

In 1824 Calcutta suffered an epidemic of an infectious fever of wide prevalence, on which Mellis wrote a paper for the Transactions of the Medical and Physical Society of Calcutta. It was noticed in the Edinburgh Medical and Surgical Journal in 1826, in an anonymous review of the initial Transactions volume of 1825.[15] James Macadam Hare was President of the Society, with Mellis as Vice-President.[16]

Others who presented papers on the 1824 Calcutta epidemic were William Twining and Henry Cavell (1797–1827); Mellis had priority of publication, in the first Transactions volume, with "Remarks on the Inflammatory Fever or Epidemic lately prevalent in Calcutta and its Environs". Further, Richard Kennedy at Baroda and the army surgeon James Mouat (died 1848) wrote in 1825, all these papers appearing in the Transactions.[17][18][19][20][21][22] William Aitken attributed to this group "the earliest accounts of this disease".[23]

Mellis and others traced the epidemic back to Aden.[24] His name for the disease was "epidemic inflammatory fever".[18]

James Christie (1829–1882), who published a book in 1876 on the epidemiology of cholera, turned in 1881 to dengue fever.[25][26] He identified the dengue context as an 1822–3 epidemic in Africa of a fever there named "kidinga", spreading in 1824 to the Bombay Presidency, then Rangoon and so arriving in Calcutta.[27] On Zanzibar in 1870, Christie had identified "kidinga" and "dengue", though the latter at that period was a dustbin category.[28][29]

Norman Chevers in A commentary on the diseases of India (1886) rehearsed the Transactions papers in historical context. By then it could be said that the 1824 dengue epidemic in the British Raj was followed by major outbreaks in 1853 and 1871–2.[30]

Honours and awards

Mellis was a Fellow of the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh and Fellow of the Royal College of Surgeons of London.[31]

Family

Mellis married in 1810 Elizabeth Masterton, in Bengal.[32] His daughter Eliza Helen married in 1836 in Calcutta Capt. Charles Dallas (1803–1840), second son of Charles Dallas, as his second wife.[33] From a time when she was still young, Mellis was the guardian of his niece Ann Elizabeth Douglas.[34] She married in 1819 David Dale (1795–1830), in Calcutta, and was mother of Sir David Dale, 1st Baronet.[35][36]

Mellis supported the medical career of his nephew James Douglas, by covering the costs of the latter's membership of the Royal College of Surgeons in London, around 1820 (via William Fairlie's agency).[37] On the return voyage from India in 1823 of a journey he had made, during which he had encountered his uncle and discussed medical matters at a hospital in Dum Dum, Douglas was faced with cases of cholera on board the ship after leaving Sagar Island. He followed a treatment he had learned at the hospital.[38]

Legacy

In 1826 Mellis presented to the Marischal Museum some Burmese antiquities. They had been imported on the Sir Charles Forbes by its captain Alexander Duthie.[39][40]

Notes

  1. ^ Douglas, James (1910). Journals and reminiscences of James Douglas, M.D. New York: Priv. print. p. 16.
  2. ^ "Douglas, James (1800-86)". Dictionary of Canadian Biography.
  3. ^ a b c d "Melles, James (1781 - 1846)". livesonline.rcseng.ac.uk.
  4. ^ Anderson, Peter John; Johnstone, James Fowler Kellas (1898). Fasti Academiae Mariscallanae Aberdonensis : selections from the records of the Marischal College and University, MDXCIII-MDCCCLX [1593-1860]. Vol. II. Aberdeen: New Spalding Club. p. 141.
  5. ^ The London Medical Directory. Churchill Livingstone. 1847. p. 194.
  6. ^ Hardy, Charles (1820). A Register of Ships, Employed in the Service of the Honorable the United East India Company, from the Year 1760 to 1819. Black, Kingsbury, Parbury and Allen. p. 233.
  7. ^ Anderson, Peter John; Johnstone, James Fowler Kellas (1898). Fasti Academiae Mariscallanae Aberdonensis : selections from the records of the Marischal College and University, MDXCIII-MDCCCLX [1593-1860]. Vol. II. Aberdeen: New Spalding Club. p. 141.
  8. ^ The Bengal Club 1827-1970 (PDF). 1997. p. 63.
  9. ^ The Bengal Directory and Annual Register. BoD – Books on Demand. 10 September 2024. p. 238. ISBN 978-3-368-75492-1.
  10. ^ Carey, Eustace (1836). Memoir of William Carey, D. D.: Late Missionary to Bengal, Professor of Oriental Languages in the College of Fort William, Calculta. Gould, Kendall and Lincoln. p. 370.
  11. ^ The Bengal Directory and General Register Ed. 2nd(1831). 1831. p. 149.
  12. ^ The Bengal and Agra Annual Guide and Gazetteer. W. Rushton and Company. 1842. p. 258.
  13. ^ Allen's Indian Mail and Register of Intelligence for British & Foreign India, China, & All Parts of the East. William H. Allen. 1845. p. 256.
  14. ^ "Mellis, James: Allen's Indian Mail, Home Deaths 1846". search.fibis.org.
  15. ^ Edinburgh Medical and Surgical Journal. A. and C. Black. 1826. p. 398.
  16. ^ Sinha, Savitri Das (23 August 2022). "Transactions of the Medical and Physical Society of Calcutta: The first English language medical journal in India". The National Medical Journal of India. 35 (1): 41–46. doi:10.25259/NMJI_436_21. PMID 36039627.
  17. ^ Reynolds, Sir John Russell (1879). A System of Medicine. Vol. I. H.C. Lea. p. 98.
  18. ^ a b Transactions of the Epidemiological Society of London. Vol. IV. John W. Davies. 1882. p. 59.
  19. ^ Cunha, José Gerson Da (1872). Dengue, its history, symptons, and treatment: with observations on the epidemic ... in Bombay, 1871-72. Thacker, Vining & Company. p. 7.
  20. ^ Crawford, Lieutenant-Colonel D. G. (8 February 2012). Roll of the Indian Medical Service 1615-1930 - Volume 1. Andrews UK Limited. p. 81. ISBN 978-1-78150-229-7.
  21. ^ Gintrac, Elie (1853). Cours théorique et clinique de pathologie interne et de thérapie médicale. v. 3, 1853 (in French). Baillière. p. 500.
  22. ^ London Journal of Medicine: A Monthly Record of the Medical Sciences. V. 1-4 (no. 1-46); Jan. 1849-Oct. 1852. Taylor, Walton, & Maberly. 1849. p. 408.
  23. ^ Reynolds, Sir John Russell (1879). A System of Medicine. H.C. Lea.
  24. ^ Thomas, James Gray (1881). Dengue. Rand, Avery & Company. p. 5.
  25. ^ Echenberg, Myron (28 February 2011). Africa in the Time of Cholera: A History of Pandemics from 1817 to the Present. Cambridge University Press. pp. 53–54. ISBN 978-1-139-49896-8.
  26. ^ Library of the Surgeon-General's Office (U.S.) (1898). Index-catalogue of the Library of the Surgeon-General's Office, United States Army: Authors and Subjects. 2nd series. U.S. Government Printing Office. p. 631.
  27. ^ International Congress of Medicine (1881). Transactions of the 1st, 2nd, 4th-17th congress. p. 436.
  28. ^ Cunha, José Gerson Da (1872). Dengue, its history, symptons, and treatment: with observations on the epidemic ... in Bombay, 1871-72. Thacker, Vining & Company. p. 2.
  29. ^ Campbell, Gwyn; Knoll, Eva-Maria (31 March 2020). Disease Dispersion and Impact in the Indian Ocean World. Springer Nature. ISBN 978-3-030-36264-5.
  30. ^ Chevers, Norman (1886). A commentary on the diseases of India. London: J. & A. Churchill. p. 80.
  31. ^ The Economist: Weekly Commercial Times, Banker's Gazette and Railway Monitor. Economist Newspaper Limited. 1846. p. 379.
  32. ^ "Aberdeen Wednesday - October 3". Aberdeen Press and Journal. 3 October 1810. p. 3.
  33. ^ Hodson, V. C. P. (1928). List of the officers of the Bengal army 1758-1834. Vol. D–K. Constable and Company, London. p. 3.
  34. ^ "Funeral of Mrs Dale". Darlington & Richmond Herald. 27 December 1879. p. 5.
  35. ^ Regality Club Glasgow (1899). The Regality Club (third series). Glasgow: James Maclehouse & Sons, for the Club. p. 120.
  36. ^ St John, Ian. "Dale, Sir David, first baronet (1829–1906)". Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (online ed.). Oxford University Press. doi:10.1093/ref:odnb/32693. (Subscription or UK public library membership required.)
  37. ^ Douglas, James (1910). Journals and reminiscences of James Douglas, M.D. New York: Priv. print. p. 68.
  38. ^ Douglas, James (1910). Journals and reminiscences of James Douglas, M.D. New York: Priv. print. p. 82.
  39. ^ "n/a". The Scotsman. 25 June 1826. p. 7.
  40. ^ "n/a". Caledonian Mercury. 19 June 1826. p. 3.
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