7. The entrails of fish. And,
8. Privies. The diarrhœa and dysentery are produced, oftener than any other form of summer and autumnal disease, by the fœtor of privies. During the revolutionary war, an American regiment, consisting of 600 men, were affected with a dysentery, from being encamped near a large mass of human fæces. The disease was suddenly checked by removing their encampment to a distance from it. Five persons in one family were affected with the yellow fever in Philadelphia, in 1805, who lived in a house in which a privy in the cellar emitted a most offensive smell. No one of them had been exposed to the foul air of Southwark, in which the fever chiefly prevailed in the autumn of that year. Three of them sickened at the same time, which obviated the suspicion of the disease being produced by contagion.
There are several other sources of malignant fevers besides those which have been mentioned. They are, exhalations from volcanoes, wells, and springs of water; also flesh[12], fish, and vegetables, eaten in a putrid state; but these seldom act in any country, and two of them only, and that rarely, in the United States.
The usual forms of the disease produced by miasmata from the sources of them which have been enumerated are,
1. Malignant or bilious yellow fever.
2. Inflammatory bilious fever.
3. Mild remittent.
4. Mild intermittent.
5. Chronic, or what is called nervous fever.
6. Febricula.