Licence: Public Domain Mark
Credit: Tableaux of New Orleans / by Bennet Dowler. Source: Wellcome Collection.
Provider: This material has been provided by the National Library of Medicine (U.S.), through the Medical Heritage Library. The original may be consulted at the National Library of Medicine (U.S.)
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![followed hearse, coffin rumbled after coffin. In a few days the Board had on its black list of yel- low fever victims 802 names! In August, 165 died; in September, 582; in October, 665; for the most part, from yellow fever. The Governor had to write another message ; but how different! The city, says Governor Robertson, has been again visited with the yellow fever. It was an idle waste of time, for me, at least, to inquire into the causes, origin and nature of this dreadful malady ; most of the vari- ous opinions with respect to it seem to be sometimes but too true. We find it in the humid and heated atmosphere of New Orleans—in Pensacola, surrounded by arid plains, and fanned by breezes from the sea—in the comparatively cold regions of the Northern States. For anything that is to be established to the contrary, it is foreign andimported, or indigenous, and contagious or not, according to circumstance or accident. The State resorted to quarantine, under the expectation that it would add to the chances of escape from this dreadful visitation. If this hope be fallacious, if no good effect has been pro- duced, if even a procrastination of its appearance has not resulted from the measure, then should it be abandoned, and our commerce relieved from the expense and inconvenience which it occa- sions. The Committee of the House of Representatives on quarantine laws, reported that during the last year, [1822,] notwithstanding the strictest compliance with those laws, our expectations were frustrated at tho very moment when we thought we could indulge the hope of the most complete success. The season was far advanced, and-in the month of September this metropolia enjoyed the most perfect health, when tho yellow fever made its appearance. Observe that this report was made by a committee altogether in favor of quarantine. They honestly acknowledged its failure, but recommended its continuance in the most rigid form, be- cause it had not been tried sufficiently long, and because other States had similar regulations! The committee avow their belief in tho contagious nature of yellow fever, and even adopt the opinion of tho Board of Health, expressive of its importation from Pensacola, through Bayou St. John. The Report of the Board of Health to the Legislature is very brief, and quite unsatisfactory, not to say absurd. They attack the physicians without ceremony for their disbelief in conta- gion, and seem to think that in opposing their own opinion to that of the faculty, they have offered proof good enough for anybody :— The opinion that yellow fever is not contagious, is directly opposed to that of the Board .' This pride of opinion sought to sustain itself with facts, as will be seen hereafter, and with such facts! The Report says that up to the end of August the inhabitants had not suffered from any malady. About the end of that month the yellow fever was imported, by a vessel from Pensa- cola, in a family named Lynch. This family, of which every member but one fell victims to yellow fever, wore lodged in Bienvillo street when this disease first manifested itself, and spread to the different parts of this city, striking in its course all unacclimated persons, who were the 6ole victims of this scourge. Poor, slandered Pensacola! That sapient maxim of the law, the greater the truth the greater the libel, does not apply in this case, as may be seen in that excellent little work, The Medical Statistics of the United States' Army, published in 1840. The report of Assistant Surgeon McMahon shows that, on the 1st of July, acargo of fish had reached Pensacola,'* in an unsound state. Nothing serious, however, happened for a month after, until an unsound young lady arrived from New Orleans—that is, a young lady with black vomit. She was just from New Orleans. The contagion must have been imported in her, for the same reason that is given for its importation in the Lynch family. She died. Soon after, the epidemic broke out in Pensacola, and about one-fifth of the inhabitants died in a few days. New Orleans infects Pensacola, and Pensacola infects New Orleans ! The one sends a young lady, tho other sends the Lynches ! Havana has blamed Charleston, for nearly a century, in the same amusing manner; and Charleston has retorted perhaps as often. The Board strongly advocated the continuance of quarantine; as did the House of Representatives, by an immense majority, by adopting the report of its committee. In the meanwhile, the great public, the men of business, felt no sympathy for an ideal or theoretical dogma which their own observation con'](https://iiif.wellcomecollection.org/image/b21115680_0033.jp2/full/800%2C/0/default.jpg)
