A memoir on contagion, more especially as it respects the yellow fever : read in convention of the Medical and Chirurgical Faculty of Maryland, on the 3d of June, 1817 / by Nathaniel Potter, M.D.
- Nathaniel Potter
- Date:
- 1818
Licence: Public Domain Mark
Credit: A memoir on contagion, more especially as it respects the yellow fever : read in convention of the Medical and Chirurgical Faculty of Maryland, on the 3d of June, 1817 / by Nathaniel Potter, M.D. 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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![delphia; is deep, and interspersed with frequent ponds of fresh water, which, from the heat and dryness of the season, emitted a most offensive smell. Near these sources of exhalation the fever prevailed with great malignity. It made its approach with chills, pains of the back, limbs, and head, which, in forty-eight or sixty hours, terminated in death. The sick discharged great quantities of filth from the stomach, of the consistence and appearance of coffee grounds, so offensive as to occasion nausea and even vomit- ing in the attendants. The feces had the same appearance. In many the disease terminated [fatally] by profuse hemor- rhages. Fortified by these facts, unsophisticated by the fallacy of theoretick refinement, we appeal to the candour and mag- nanimity of the advocates of contagion and importation, and challenge them to torture this common sense in physicks to suit the visions of their creed. Were these people smit- ten from the heavens by the malign influence of the stars under which they lived, or was pestilence shaken from the Gorgon abyss of these hotbeds of intestine putrefaction, boiling under an almost vertical sun? But we arc still to enforce our plea, by evidence derived from the demonstration of our own senses, the most unerr- ing sources of experience. In August, 1793, (having been summoned to the eastern shore of this state, in July, in consequence of the death of my lamented father,) the duty of attending the sick, in the sphere of his former practice, devolved on me. After a spring unusually wet, and during a summer as uncommonly hot, the bilious remitting fever be- came epidemick. On the 9th of August, I was requested to visit Mrs. Hall, consort of Levi Hall, who had been confined three days. I found her in the agonies of death. Her skin of a deep orange colour, her eyes red and prominent, pulse inter- mitting, and ejecting copiously from her stomach once every eight or ten minutes the secretion, now known by the name of black vomit. She expired in a convulsion while I sat at the G](https://iiif.wellcomecollection.org/image/b21148156_0025.jp2/full/800%2C/0/default.jpg)
