[1257] Webster, Brief History of Epidemick and Pestilential Diseases. Hartford, 1799, II. 253: “Away, then, with crowded cities—the thirty feet lots and alleys, the artificial reservoirs of filth, the hot-beds of atmospheric poison! Such are our cities—they are great prisons, built with immense labour to breed infection and hurrying mankind prematurely to the grave.”
[1258] W. Douglass, M.D., The Practical History of a New Epidemical Eruptive Miliary Fever, with an Angina Ulcusculosa, which prevailed in New England in the years 1735 and 1736. Boston, N.E. 1736. This rare essay was reprinted in the New England Journ. of Med. and Surg. XIV. 1 (Jan. 1825).
[1259] In Belknap’s History of New Hampshire. Boston, 1791.
[1260] Gent. Magaz. Feb. 1752, p. 73.
[1261] The account by Kearsley, of Philadelphia, written about 1769 (Gent. Magaz. XXXIX. 251), refers to a great epidemic of throat-disease in New England in the spring, summer and autumn of 1746; but the date is almost certainly a mistake for 1736, as no such epidemic is known on contemporary authority.
[1262] Cadwallader Colden, M.D. “Letter to Dr Fothergill on the Throat Distemper,” dated New York, 1 Oct. 1753, in Med. Obs. and Inquiries, I. 211.
[1263] Belknap, III. 421.
[1264] Samuel Bard, M.D. “An Inquiry into the Nature, Cause and Cure of the Angina Suffocativa, or Sore throat Distemper, as it is commonly called by the inhabitants of this city and colony.” Trans. Amer. Philos. Soc. I. (1769-1771). Philad. 1771, p. 322. What purports to be a translation of this, is given in Reutte’s Recueil d’Obs. sur le Croup (Paris, 1810), the name of “croup” being introduced into the title, and some strange liberties taken with the text.
[1265] The impression made upon modern historians by these American accounts of the throat-distemper has not always been the same. Hecker finds in the malady described by Douglass the form of Frieselbräune, or miliary diphtheria, a somewhat rare and sporadic malady; in the account by Bard, he finds häutige Brandbräune, or membranous angina maligna; while he finds in an account by Chalmers for Charleston, S. Carolina, in 1770, a third variety, Friesel-Scharlachbräune, or miliary scarlet angina. Again, Jaffe finds in the account by Bard “many analogies with the diphtheria of our own day.” Hirsch identifies the throat-distemper of Douglass and Colden as “exquisite scarlet fever” and the disease described by Bard as diphtheria. Häser identifies the epidemic described by Douglass as diphtheria. Bard himself did not doubt that the disease which he saw in New York previous to 1771 was the same that Douglass saw at Boston in 1735-36. Hecker, Geschichte der neueren Heilkunde. Bk. I. chap. 8. Max Jaffe, “Die Diphtherie in epidemiol. u. nosol. Beziehung, &c.” Original paper in Schmidt’s Jahrbücher, CXIII. (1862), p. 97. Hirsch, 1st ed. of Handb. der histor. geogr. Pathol. I. 237, note 6; II. 125, note 4; and 2nd ed. III. 80. Eng. transl. Häser, Geschichte, &c. III. 471.
[1266] Gent. Magaz. IX. Nov. 1739, p. 606:—Died, “Nov. 27, the eldest and youngest son of Henry Pelham, Esq. of sore throats.”