All ages were affected by this fever, but persons between fourteen and forty years of age were most subject to it. Many old people had it, but it was not so fatal to them as to robust persons in middle life. It affected children of all ages. I met with a violent case of the disease, in a child of four months, and a moderate case of it, in a child of but ten weeks old. The latter had a deep yellow skin. Both these children recovered.
The proportion of children who suffered by this fever may be conceived from a single fact. Seventy-five persons were buried in the grave-yard of the Swedish church in the months of August, September, and October, twenty-four of whom were children. They were buried chiefly in September and October; months in which children generally enjoy good health in our city.
Men were more subject to the disease than women. Pregnancy seemed to expose women to it.
The refugees from the French West-Indies universally escaped it. This was not the case with the natives of France, who had been settled in the city.
It is nothing new for epidemics to affect persons of one nation, and to pass by persons of other nations, in the same city or country. At Nimeguen, in the year 1736, Deigner informs us, that the French people (two old men excepted), and the Jews, escaped a dysentery which was universal among persons of all other nations. Ramazini tells us, that the Jews at Modena escaped a tertian fever which affected nearly all the other inhabitants of the town. Shenkius says, that the Dutch and Italians escaped a plague, which prevailed for two years in one of the towns of Switzerland; and Dr. Bell, in an inaugural dissertation, published at Edinburgh, in 1779, remarks, that the jail fever, which attacked the soldiers of the duke of Buccleugh's regiment, spared the French prisoners who were guarded by them. It is difficult to account for these facts. However numerous their causes may be, a difference in diet, which is as much a distinguishing mark of nations as dress or manners, will probably be found to be one of them.
From the accounts of the yellow fever which had been published by many writers, I was led to believe that the negroes in our city would escape it. In consequence of this belief, I published the following extract in the American Daily Advertiser, from Dr. Lining's history of the yellow fever, as it had four times appeared in Charleston, in South-Carolina.
“There is something very singular (says the doctor) in the constitution of the negroes, which renders them not liable to this fever; for though many of them were as much exposed as the nurses to the infection, yet I never knew of one instance of this fever among them, though they are equally subject with the white people to the bilious fever[46].”
A day or two after this publication the following letter from the mayor of the city, to Mr. Claypoole, the printer of the Mail, appeared in his paper.
“Sir,