Note 14 — AN INQUIRY INTO THE VARIOUS SOURCES OF THE USUAL FORMS OF SUMMER & AUTUMNAL DISEASE IN THE UNITED STATES, AND THE MEANS OF PREVENTING THEM.

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.