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
The deaths from this fever amounted to between three and four hundred.
They would probably have been more numerous, had not those families who
were in competent circumstances fled into the country, and had not the
poor been removed, by the board of health, from the infected atmosphere
of Southwark, to tents provided for them in the neighbourhood of the
city; and they would probably have been fewer, considering the tractable
nature of the disease, when met by suitable remedies in its early stage,
had not the sick concealed their indisposition, in many instances, for
two or three days, lest they should be dragged to the city hospital, or
have centinels placed at their doors, to prevent any communication with
their friends and neighbours. While these attempts were made to check
the progress of the fever, it did not escape the notice of many of the
citizens of Philadelphia, that not a single instance occurred of its
being communicated by contagion, in any of the families in the city, in
which persons had sickened or died with it, and that while the sick were
deprived of the kind offices of their friends and neighbours, lest they
should be infected, physicians, and the members of the board of health,
passed by the guards every day, in their visits to the same sick people,
and afterwards mixed with their fellow-citizens, in every part of the
city, without changing their clothes.
The yellow fever appeared early in the season in New-Haven, in
Connecticut, and in Providence, on Rhode-Island, in both of which places
it was derived from putrid exhalation, and was speedily and effectually
checked by removing the healthy persons who lived in its neighbourhood to
a distance from it. Several sporadic cases of it occurred during the
autumn in Gloucester county, in New-Jersey, and in Mifflin and Chester
counties, in Pennsylvania. It was epidemic in New-York at the same time
it prevailed in Southwark and Philadelphia. The following extract of a
letter from the health officer of New-York, to one of his friends,
contains a satisfactory proof that it was not, in that city, an imported
disease.
_Quarantine-ground, Sept. 7._
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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