Medical Inquiries and Observations, Vol. 3: The Second Edition, Revised and Enlarged by the AuthorRush, Benjamin
Science
Medical Inquiries and Observations, Vol. 3: The Second Edition, Revised and Enlarged by the Author
Rush, Benjamin
Medicine; Yellow fever -- Pennsylvania -- Philadelphia
8. In the histories of the disease which have been preserved in this
country, it has _six_ times appeared about the first or middle of August,
and declined or ceased about the middle of October: viz. in 1732, 1739,
1745, and 1748 in Charleston, in 1791 in New-York, and in 1793 in
Philadelphia. This frequent occurrence of the yellow fever at the usual
period of our common bilious remittents, cannot be ascribed to accidental
coincidence, but must be resolved, in most cases, into the combination of
more active miasmata with the predisposition of a tropical season. In
speaking of a tropical season, I include that kind of weather in which
rains and heats are alternated with each other, as well as that which is
uniformly warm.
9. Several circumstances attended this epidemic, which do not occur in
the West-India yellow fever. It affected children as well as adults, in
common with our annual bilious fevers. In the West-Indies, Dr. Hume
tells us, it never attacked any person under puberty. It had, moreover,
many peculiar symptoms (as I have already shown) which are not to be met
with in any of the histories of the West India yellow fever.
10. Why should it surprise us to see a yellow fever generated amongst us?
It is only a higher grade of a fever which prevails every year in our
city, from vegetable putrefaction. It conforms, in the difference of its
degrees of violence and danger, to season as well as climate, and in this
respect it is upon a footing with the small-pox, the measles, the
sore-throat, and several other diseases. There are few years pass, in
which a plethoric habit, and more active but limited miasmata, do not
produce sporadic cases of true yellow fever in Philadelphia. It is very
common in South and North-Carolina and in Virginia, and there are facts
which prove, that not only strangers, but native individuals, and, in one
instance, a whole family, have been carried off by it in the state of
Maryland. It proved fatal to one hundred persons in the city of New-York
in the year of 1791, where it was evidently generated by putrid
exhalation. The yellow colour of the skin has unfortunately too often
been considered as the characteristic mark of this fever, otherwise many
other instances of its prevalence might be discovered, I have no doubt,
in every part of the United States. I wish, with Dr. Mosely, the term
_yellow_ could be abolished from the titles of this fever, for this
colour is not only frequently absent, but sometimes occurs in the mildest
bilious remittents. Dr. Haller, in his pathology, describes an epidemic
of this kind in Switzerland, in which this colour generally attended, and
I have once seen it almost universal in a common bilious fever, which
prevailed in the American army, in the year 1776.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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