Medical Inquiries and Observations, Vol. 4: The Second Edition, Revised and Enlarged by the AuthorRush, Benjamin
History
Medical Inquiries and Observations, Vol. 4: The Second Edition, Revised and Enlarged by the Author
Rush, Benjamin
Medicine; Yellow fever -- Pennsylvania -- Philadelphia
These simple and connected facts, in which all the physicians in the
United States who derive the yellow fever from domestic causes have
agreed, will receive fresh support by comparing them with the different
and contrary opinions of the physicians who maintain its importation.
Some of them have asserted it to be a specific disease, and derived it
from the East and West-Indies; others derive it from Beulam, on the coast
of Africa; a third sect have called it a ship fever; a fourth have
ascribed it to a mixture of imported contagion with the foul air of our
cities; while a fifth, who believed it to be imported in 1793, have
supposed it to be the offspring of a contagion left by the disease of
that year, revived by the heat of our summers, and disseminated, ever
since, through the different cities of our country. The number of these
opinions, clearly proves, that no one of them is tenable.
A belief in the non-contagion of the yellow fever, or of its being
incommunicable except in one of the five ways that have been mentioned,
is calculated to produce the following good effects:
1. It will deliver the states which have sea-ports from four-fifths of
the expences of their present quarantine laws and lazarettoes. A very
small apparatus, in laws and officers, would be sufficient to prevent the
landing of persons affected by the ship fever in our cities, and the more
dangerous practice, of ships pouring streams of pestilential air, from
their holds, upon the citizens who live near our docks and wharves.
2. It will deliver our merchants from the losses incurred by the delays
of their ships, by long and unnecessary quarantines. It will, moreover,
tend to procure the immediate admission of our ships into foreign ports,
by removing that belief in the contagious nature of the yellow fever,
which originated in our country, and which has been spread, by the public
acts of our legislatures and boards of health, throughout the globe.
3. It will deliver our citizens from the danger to which they are
exposed, by spending the time of the quarantine, on board of vessels in
the neighbourhood of the marshes, which form the shores of the rivers or
coasts of quarantine roads. This danger is much increased by idleness,
and by the vexation which is excited, by sailors and passengers being
detained, unnecessarily, fifteen or twenty days from their business and
friends.
4. It will lead us to a speedy removal of all the excretions, and a
constant ventilation of the rooms of patients in the yellow fever, and
thereby to prevent the accumulation, and further putrefaction of those
exhalations which may reproduce it.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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