To every natural evil the Author of Nature has kindly prepared an antidote. Pestilential fevers furnish no exception to this remark. The means of preventing them are as much under the power of human reason and industry, as the means of preventing the evils of lightning and common fire. I am so satisfied of the truth of this opinion, that I look for a time when our courts of law shall punish cities and villages, for permitting any of the sources of bilious and malignant fevers to exist within their jurisdiction.
I have repeatedly asserted the yellow fever of the United States not to be contagious. I shall now mention the proofs of that assertion, and endeavour to explain instances of its supposed contagion upon other principles.
Footnotes:
[10] Medicina Nautica, p. 324.
[11] It has been a common practice with many families, in New-York and Philadelphia, for several years past, to lay in a winter store of oysters in their cellars in the fall of the year. May not a part of these oysters, left in these cellars from forgetfulness, or from being unfit for use, become, by putrifying there, the cause of malignant fevers in the succeeding summer and autumn?
[12] The following fact, communicated to me by Mr. Samuel Lyman, a member of congress from the state of Massachusetts, shows the importance of attending to the condition of butchers' meat in our attempts to prevent malignant fevers.
A farmer in New-Hampshire, who had overheated a fat ox by excessive labour in the time of harvest, perceiving him to be indisposed, instantly killed him, and sent his flesh to a neighbouring market. Of twenty four persons who ate of this flesh, fifteen died in a few days. The fatal disease produced by this aliment fell, with its chief force, upon the stomach and bowels.
[13] Medical Journal, vol. iv.
[14] I have once known this breath, in a gentleman who had carried the seeds of the yellow fever in his body from Philadelphia into its neighbourhood, create sickness at the stomach in his wife; and I have heard of an instance in which a person, who left Philadelphia when highly impregnated with the miasmata of the same fever, creating sickness at the stomach in four or five persons who sat at the same table with him in the country. None of the above persons were afterwards affected by the fever. In an anonymous history of the plague in London, in the year 1664, in the possession of the author, it is said, the breath was a well-known signal of infection to persons who were not infected, and that whenever it was perceived, individuals and companies fled from it. The sickness in the above-mentioned persons was similar to that which is sometimes excited by the smell of a sore leg, or a gun-shot wound, upon the removal of its first dressing. It does not produce fever, because there is no predisposition to it.
[15] Desportes, vol. i. p. 140.