Some account of the last yellow fever epidemic of British Guiana / by Daniel Blair ; edited by John Davy.

Date:
1850
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Some account of the last yellow fever epidemic of British Guiana / by Daniel Blair ; edited by John Davy. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh. The original may be consulted at the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh.

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    DIVISION III. Some of the physicians of New Spain admit that the epi- demics of the vomits, as well as the smallpox, are periodical in the torrid zone, and that the happy time already approaches when Europeans may land on the coast of Vera Cruz without incurring greater risk than at Tampico, Coro, Cumana, or wherever the climate is excessively warm and at the same time very healthy. If this hope is realised, it will be of the greatest importance carefully to examine the modifications of the atmo- sphere, the changes which shall take place at the surface of the earth, the draining of marshes, and, in a word, all the pheno- mena which shall coincide with the termination of the epi- demic.— Humboldt. * In the preliminary remarks, the mud flats and sand banks which form the foreshores of British Guiana have been referred to: of such as these no doubt the whole colony was originally formed. They shelve out into the sea in front of the poldered land, and are composed of banks or flats, of fine siliceous sand (caddy), or shell sand, or drift mud, in alternate ridges, or super- imposed in the order as stated. The sea sometimes encroaches on the land, and these foreshores are washed away, and planta- tion embankments injured or destroyed, and the safety of the town threatened. Sometimes the sea again recedes, new land rises in the sea front, demanding laborious and expensive opera- tions to keep the draining trenches and sluices patent. These oscillations are periodical and alternating ; but their causes and laws have never been determined or investigated: and, indeed, * [A belief, founded on partial experience, commonly prevails in the West Indies, that the outbreak of yellow fever there is periodic, as expressed in the quotation in the text from Humboldt. Its recurrence at intervals of time may be considered as well established; but it cannot be admitted to be equally well established that the intervals are regular and alike, so as to ad- mit of being calculated. The Return in foot-note p. 46, 47. is proof of this in Barbados; and were there Returns of the same kind for the other islands in which troops have been stationed, additional proof of it, it may be confidently asserted, would be afforded.]—Ed.
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