[181] Medical Review, vol. iv.
[182] Dr. Moseley who has written at some length on the interruption given to military operations by diseases, gives an account of general Dalling’s expedition in 1780, where the English troops, confined in the castle of St. Juan, in an unhealthy situation on the river Nicaragua, were cut off by diseases; but these were fluxes and intermittents. He doth not mention the yellow fever among them. He tells us indeed that the troops under general Garth brought the jail fever along with them, and that those who returned to Jamaica were harassed with obstinate intermittents, with diarrhœa, dysentery, or painful enlargements of the liver and spleen.
[184] Treatise on Tropical Diseases, p. 173.
[185] If physicians censure one another at this rate, how is it to be determined who gives a true state of the matter?
[186] This position of Dr. Moseley is not universally received. The meaning of the word remission certainly is a temporary abatement, and implies a recurrence, of the same symptoms which originally took place. Dr. Moseley describes the yellow fever as beginning with one kind of symptoms which suddenly cease and are succeeded after a certain interval by others of a quite different kind; and he claims the discovery as his own. If he be right in this description, the yellow fever is certainly not a remittent; if otherwise, it must be difficult to establish any true distinction between them.
[187] At Strasburg, in Germany, our author says that he saw a man who had been an idiot for more than a year from a stroke of the sun. The 8th of July 1707 was so hot in England that many people died at their work, and many horses and oxen were killed by the sun’s rays. In 1743, eleven thousand people perished from the 14th to the 25th of July in the streets of Pekin in China. On the 30th of July, 1705, the heat at Montpelier was so great, that eggs were roasted by it. Chalmers, in his account of the weather and diseases of South Carolina, says, that he has seen a beef-steak, laid on a cannon for twenty minutes, deprived of its juices, and overdone by the excessive force of the sun’s rays.
[189] Med. Repos. vol. i, p. 316.
[190] Webster’s Collection.