Report on quarantine on the Southern and Gulf coasts of the United States / by Harvey E. Brown.

  • Brown, Harvey Ellicott, 1840-1889.
Date:
1873
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Report on quarantine on the Southern and Gulf coasts of the United States / by Harvey E. Brown. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by The Royal College of Surgeons of England. The original may be consulted at The Royal College of Surgeons of England.

    9/122 (page 5)
    Currie, Diseases most prevalent in the United States of America, p. 63.) The disease did not appear again in New York until 1745, although Web- ster, in his book on Epidemics, speaks of “malignant infectious diseases” in 1732 and 1743. In 1741 it made its second appearance in Philadel- phia. There were at this time a large number of German immigrants in the city, who suffered severely. It prevailed until the approach of cold weather, and caused about two hundred and fifty deaths. Carpen- ter (Sketches of Yellow Fever, p. 12) gives Lind as authority for the assertion that it was introduced about the 1st of June “ by means of a trunk of wearing-apparel belonging to a gentleman who had died of the disease in Barbadoes.” (Lind on Fevers and Infections, p. 107.) A rather doubtful outbreak of disease, thought by some to be yellow fever, occurred in 1744; and in 1747 it was again epidemic. It was the uni- versal opinion that it was due to foreign importation from the West In- dies, as it prevailed chiefly in those parts of the city near the wharves, in sailors’ lodging-houses, and among the classes of people most likely to be about the shipping. Like the previous epidemic, the clothing of a person who had died in the West Indies was asserted to be the source of in- fection. Dr. Thomas Bond ascribed it to the presence in port of infected ships, upon which the disease broke out after their arrival. No person seems to have thought of giving the disease a local origin. (Bond, North American Medical and Surgical Journal, vol. 4, p. 271 ; La Boche on Yellow Fever, vol. 1, pp. 60, 61.) In 1762 it again prevailed in Philadel- phia, commencing about the middle of August and terminating the last of October. Dr John Bedman, in his account of this epidemic, (pp. 12, 13,) says: Its first and greatest ravages were about the new market and the square to the east- ward of it, in which, after some considerable search and tracing it, it was found to have originated in a number of small back tenements, forming a kind of court, the entrance to which was by two narrow alleys from Front and Pine streets, and where sailors often had their lodging, to which a sick sailor from on board a vessel, from the Havannah, (where it then raged,) was brought privately after night, before the vessel had come up to town, to the house of one Leadbetter, where he soon died, and was secretly buried; and, I believe, Leadbetter, with most of his family, and many others in that court, soon after fell a sacrifice; and from thence it spread rapidly, first affecting the houses nearest adjoining, in Front ^nd Pine streets. Public opinion was universal in ascribing it to foreign importation, from the West Indies. La Boche lays great stress on the fact that, in all of these epidemics, contradictory statements are made by different writers as to the especial vessel, or other source, from which the infection spread; but this is not to be wondered at, when we consider, as stated by that distinguished author himself, that we have no accurate professional accounts of these epidemics, being dependent for what we know of them entirely to let- ters, &c., written by eye-witnesses, who would be likely to indite what was the prevailing opinion, without any minute investigation of the sub- ject. Moreover, there is no reason why they should not all have been correct, and the fever introduced by two or three different channels in the same season. From this time until 1791 the country was free from the fever, an immunity which Carpenter shows (op. cit., p. 45) was due to the destruction of the West India trade by the passage of the series of acts of Parliament known as the “ commercial monopoly,” and by the subsequent war of the Bevolution, which, of course, destroyed all trade. With the return of peace, however, came a renewal of the West India traffic, and with it the long respite which the coast had known from yellow fever came to an end, it making its appearance in