Under these circumstances the Translator thought it would be useful to call the attention of the practitioners in medicine of this country, to the subject of pestilential contagion, by publishing the following Account of the Plague at Moscow in the year 1771. Besides the narrative of the rise and progress of the disorder, and the description of its symptoms and treatment, this account contains also a detail of the methods which were successfully employed in that city for checking and totally extinguishing the contagion; and in particular a detail of the means by which a large edifice, situated in the centre of Moscow, and containing about one thousand four hundred persons, was preserved from the pestilence during the whole of the time that it raged there. This account is translated from a treatise republished in French, and originally written in Latin by Dr. Mertens, under the following title: "_Traité de la Peste, contenant l'Histoire de celle qui a régné à Moscou en 1771; par Charles de Mertens, Docteur en Medecine, &c. ouvrage publié d'abord en Latin[3]; actuellement mis en François, &c. à Vienne, 1784_." The author (who was physician to the Foundling-Hospital, at Moscow, and resided in that city during the whole of the time that the plague raged there) divides his treatise into four chapters; in the first of which he gives a history of the plague as it appeared at Moscow; in the second, he treats of the diagnosis; in the third, of the curative treatment; and in the fourth, of the precautions or methods of prevention. So many works have been published on the plague, that whoever writes a regular treatise on this disorder cannot avoid repeating many observations that have been made by others before him. Hence, instead of dividing the present pamphlet into chapters and sections, and following the original word for word throughout; the translator has taken the liberty of extracting from the two last chapters those parts only which contain new observations, or which have an immediate reference to the narrative; which last he has translated entire, excepting half a dozen lines at the beginning, that seem to have been introduced by the author for no other purpose but that of quoting professor _Schreiber_'s[4] work on the plague, which broke out in the Ukraine in the years 1738 and 1739. Besides the preface[5], and some other matters noticed in their respective places, the following topics of discussion have been omitted; viz. 1st. _the comparison between the plague and the smallpox_; 2d. _the reflexions on the inoculation of the plague_; 3d. _the precautions to be employed in wars with the Turks_; and 4th. _the precautions continually necessary in places exposed to the pestilential contagion_.