: Medical Inquiries and Observations Vol. 4 The Second Edition Revised and Enlarged by the Author by Rush Benjamin - Medicine; Yellow fever Pennsylvania Philadelphia

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AN ACCOUNT

OF THE

BILIOUS REMITTING AND INTERMITTING

AS IT

APPEARED IN PHILADELPHIA,

IN 1797.

The winter of 1797 was in general healthy. During the spring, which was cold and wet, no diseases of any consequence occurred. The spring vegetables were late in coming to maturity, and there were every where in the neighbourhood of Philadelphia scanty crops of hay. In June and July there fell but little rain. Dysenteries, choleras, scarlatina, and mumps, appeared in the suburbs in the latter month. On the 8th of July I visited Mr. Frisk, and on the 25th of the same month I visited Mr. Charles Burrel in the yellow fever, in consultation with Dr. Physick. They both recovered by the use of plentiful depleting remedies.

The weather from the 2d to the 9th of August was rainy. On the 1st of this month I was called to visit Mr. Nathaniel Lewis, in a malignant bilious fever. On the 3d I visited Mr. Elisha Hall, with the same disease. He had been ill several days before I saw him. Both these gentlemen died on the 6th of the month. They were both very yellow after death. Mr. Hall had a black vomiting on the day he died.

The news of the death of these two citizens, with unequivocal symptoms of yellow fever, excited a general alarm in the city. Attempts were made to trace it to importation, but a little investigation soon proved that it was derived from the foul air of a ship which had just arrived from Marseilles, and which discharged her cargo at Pinestreet wharf, near the stores occupied by Mr. Lewis and Mr. Hall. Many other persons about the same time were affected with the fever from the same cause, in Water and Penn-streets. About the middle of the month, a ship from Hamburgh communicated the disease, by means of her foul air, to the village of Kensington. It prevailed, moreover, in many instances in the suburbs, and in Kensington, from putrid exhalations from gutters and marshy grounds, at a distance from the Delaware, and from the foul ships which have been mentioned. Proofs of the truth of each of these assertions were afterwards laid before the public.

The disease was confined chiefly to the district of Southwark and the village of Kensington, for several weeks. In September and October, many cases occurred in the city, but most of them were easily traced to the above sources.

The following account of the weather, during the months of August, September, and October was obtained from Mr. Thomas Pryor. It is different from the weather in 1793. It is of consequence to attend to this fact, inasmuch as it shows that an inflammatory constitution of the atmosphere can exist under different circumstances of the weather. It likewise accounts for the variety in the symptoms of the fever in different years and countries. Such is the influence of season and climate upon the symptoms of this fever, that it led Dr. M'Kitterick to suppose that the yellow fever of Charleston, so accurately described by Dr. Lining, in the second volume of the Physical and Literary Essays of Edinburgh, was a different disease from the yellow fever of the West-Indies.

De Febre Indiae-Occidentalis Maligna Flava, p. 12.

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