Note 22 — LETTER XIII.

The yellow fever, which has committed such dreadful ravages of late years in America, is certainly to be considered as a sort of plague. It first appeared at Philadelphia in the year 1793; in 1794 it appeared at Baltimore; in 1795, at New York and Norfolk; and in 1796, though the matter was hushed up as much as possible, in order to prevent an alarm, similar to that which had injured the city so much the preceding year, yet in New York a far greater number of deaths than usual were heard of during the summer and autumn, strongly supposed to have been occasioned by the same malignant disorder.

The accounts given of the calamitous consequences attendant upon it, in these different places, are all much alike, and nearly similar to those given of the plague:—The people dying suddenly, and under the most shocking circumstances—such as were well flying away—the sick abandoned, and perishing for want of common necessaries—the dead buried in heaps together without any ceremony—charity at an end—the ties of friendship and consanguinity disregarded by many—others, on the contrary, nobly coming forward, and at the hazard of their own lives doing all in their power to relieve their fellow citizens, and avert the general woe.——At Philadelphia, in the space of about three months, no less than four thousand inhabitants were swept off by this dreadful malady, a number, at that time, amounting to about one tenth of the whole. Baltimore and New York did not suffer so severely; but at Norfolk, which is computed to contain about three thousand people, no less than five hundred fell victims to it.

The disorder has been treated very differently by different physicians, and as some few have survived under each system that has been tried, no general one has yet been adopted. I was told, however, by several people in Norfolk, who resided in the most sickly part of the town during the whole time the fever lasted, that as a preventative medicine, a strong mercurial purge was very generally administered, and afterwards Peruvian bark; and that few of those who had taken this medicine were attacked by the fever. All however that can be done by medicine to stop the progress of the disorder, when it has broke out in a town, seems to be of no very great effect; for as long as the excessive hot weather lasts the fever rages, but it regularly disappears on the approach of cold weather. With regard to its origin there have been also various opinions; some have contended that it was imported into every place where it appeared from the West Indies; others, that it was generated in the country. These opinions have been ably supported on either side of the question by medical men, who resided at the different places where the fever has appeared. There are a few notorious circumstances, however, which lead me, as an individual, to think that the fever has been generated on the American continent. In the first place, the fever has always broken out in those parts of towns which were most closely built, and where the streets have been suffered through negligence to remain foul and nasty; in the second place, it has regularly broken out during the hottest time of the year, in the months of July and August, when the air on the American coast is for the most part stagnant and sultry, and when vegetable and animal matter becomes putrid in an incredible short space of time; thirdly, numbers of people died of the disorder in New York, in the year 1796, notwithstanding that every West Indian vessel which entered the port that season was examined by the health officer, a regular bred physician, and that every one suspected was obliged to perform quarantine. The people in New York are so fully persuaded that the fever originates in America from putrid matter, that they have stopped up one or two docks, which were receptacles for the filth of the neighbourhood, and which contaminated the air when the tide was out.