Yellow Fever, Considered in Its Historical, Pathological, Etiological, and Therapeutical Relations, Vol. 1 of 2: Including a Sketch of the Disease as It Has Occurred in Philadelphia From 1699 to 1854, With an Examination of the Connections Between It and

Excerpt from Yellow Fever, Considered in Its Historical, Pathological, Etiological, and Therapeutical Relations, Vol. 1 of 2: Including a Sketch of the Disease as It Has Occurred in Philadelphia From 1699 to 1854, With an Examination of the Connections Between It and the Fevers Known Under the Same Name in Other Parts of Temperate, as Well as in Tropical, Regions

The subject of yellow fever has long attracted the attention of the medical profession on this and the other side of the Atlantic. Upon the origin, the mode of propagation, the pathology, and the appropriate treatment of that fatal disease, as much, perhaps, has been written, particularly within the last sixty years, as upon any other malady flesh is heir to. The medical litera ture of England and France is rich in works of high value on these topics, both as regards didactic treatises on the disease considered in its totality, or monographs on its several branches, and descriptions of separate epidemics observed in Europe and tropical regions; while Spain, Italy, and, to a more limited extent, Germany, have contributed valuably to our stock of publica tions on the same subject.

Of all countries situated beyond the limits of the tropics, none has been so frequently visited by, or has suffered so severely from, the disease as our own, in some portions of which it may be viewed as assuming, in great measure, the character of a true endemic. But while such is the case in New Orleans, Charleston, and other southern points of our extensive coast; while we almost annually find that unacclimatized strangers are there attacked at the usual season; and while the disease, after short intervals of repose, as sumes the form of a more or less diffused and fatal epidemic, many of the Atlantic cities and towns of our middle States, and a few of the more north ern ones, though seldom the seat of even sporadic cases, have been at times more or less scourged by epidemical manifestations of the disease.

Among the places thus visited, the city of Philadelphia has, doubtless, to an intense degree, suffered from the calamity in question. Soon after its settlement, it was severely afflicted by the fever under consideration; and from that epoch to the present time, embracing a period of little more than a century and a half, it has been the seat of many such visitations, the result of which was, on some occasions, of the most destructive character. The accounts handed down to us of the extensive diffusion of the disease during some of those epidemics, and of the mortality accruing therefrom, afford, indeed, pictures as appalling as anything recorded respecting other Ameri can cities, and but little, if at all, inferior to the results of the memorable pestilence of Andalusia in 1800, and of Barcelona some twenty years after.

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