In 1769 war broke out between the Russians and Turks. The year following intelligence was received that the Turks had carried the plague into Wallachia and Moldavia, where it was making great ravages; and that in the town of Jassy a number of Russians had been carried off by a disorder, which, on its first appearance, was called by some of the faculty, a malignant fever; but which the most eminent physicians in the place declared to be the plague. _Baron Asch_, first physician to the army, sent an account of this disorder in a letter, written in German, to his brother, a physician at Moscow, who showed it to me. The following is a translation thereof: "It attacks people in different ways. Some are slightly indisposed, complaining for several days of a headach, sometimes very violent, at other times less so, and now and then ceasing altogether, and then coming on again. The patients are affected with pains in the chest, and particularly in the neck; they gradually become languid and dejected, with something like intoxication and drowsiness. They have a particular taste in their mouths, which soon turns to a bitter; at the same time they have an ardor urinæ. To these succeed chilly and hot fits, and, lastly, all the symptoms which characterize the plague. The disease sometimes terminates favourably by perspiration, before the appearance of exanthemata, buboes, or carbuncles. The contagion is sometimes more rapid and more violent in its action; in that case the infected are suddenly seized after making a hearty meal, after a fit of anger, or too much bodily motion, with head-ach, nausea, and vomiting; the eyes become inflamed and watery (_larmoyans_), and pains are felt in those parts of the body where buboes and carbuncles are about to appear. There is no great degree of heat. The pulse is sometimes full and hard; sometimes small, soft, and scarcely perceptible; it often intermits, and, what should be particularly noticed, it is often feeble. These symptoms are accompanied with lassitude, a white tongue, dry skin, urine of a pale yellow colour, or turbid, but without sediment; frequently with a diarrhoea, which it is difficult to stop; and, lastly, with delirium, buboes, carbuncles, and petechiæ[7]." The following summer this disorder spread into Poland, and committed great havoc there; from thence it passed to Kiow, where it destroyed four thousand souls. Immediately on its appearance at the last-mentioned place, all communication between that town and Moscow was cut off; guards were stationed on all the great roads, and all travellers were ordered to perform quarantine for several weeks.