Tableau of the yellow fever of 1853 : with topographical, chronological, and historical sketches of the epidemics of New Orleans since their origin in 1796, illustrative of the quarantine question / by Bennet Dowler.

  • Bennet Dowler
Date:
1854
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Tableau of the yellow fever of 1853 : with topographical, chronological, and historical sketches of the epidemics of New Orleans since their origin in 1796, illustrative of the quarantine question / 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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    CHAPTER XVI. MORALIZATIONS UPON THE EPIDEMIC OF 1853. It is doubtlessly wisest not to wed a mournful philosophy. The illusions, as the realities of life are mingled with good as well as evil. Horace, La Fontaine, and Byron have spoken despondingly of the mission and the hopes of humanity: Vita summa brevis spent nos vetat incohare long am. Quittez le long espoir et les vastes pansees. Know that whatever thou hast been 't were better not to be. There's not a joy this world can give like that it takes away. Such inconsolable knowledge not being derived from the dreams of the novelist, nor from the fictitious woes personated by the tragedian, is not only unrelieved, but augmented by imagination, by the anticipations of impending danger during the rapid march of a desolating epidemic, which prostrates hundreds of friends and neighbors in a day, and, like the flash from the tempest-bearing cloud in a starless night, discloses to survivors the perilous rocks upon which the bark of life may be broken in a moment by the fast gathering storm of death. The bloodiest battle-fields of modern times scarcely can compare with the New Orleans epidemic of 1803, which destroyed five times more than the British Army lost on the field of Waterloo. There were among the people those fluctuations of hope and fear which armies feel amid the shocks of battle, founded on chance and destiny: There's a Divinity that shapes our ends, Bough hew them how we may. *' The ball on which my name is not written, cannot hit me, says the soldier in the field of battle—and how, without such belief, could he maintain such courage and gayity in the most imminent peril. The moral consequences attributed to epidemics a few centuries ago, are so discreditable to humanity as to appear almost incredible, and certainly do not appear in the present age. The accounts transmitted to us concerning the black plague, which appears to have resembled yellow fever in many respects, show that demora- lization raged equally with the epidemic;—all the ties of friendship, of blood, of morality and of religion were dissolved, or merged into brutality, sensuality and licentiousness. [Ozanam. Hist. Med. iv. 87.] The world must have grown better. Nowhere, least of all in New Orleans, is such a sad picture of humanity seen as having any connection with epidemic visitations;—instead of demoralization, benevolence illustrates the dreadful march of death, and sheds its sunshine upon the closing scenes of life—the supreme hour of dissolution. The deplorable scenes of demoralization which medical historians have portray- ed, as occurring in former times, had their origin, for the most part, in the fear of contagion, which led to the abondonment of the sick, and reckless conduct under the belief that contagion and death would soon arrive. The most hideous fictions were propagated in distant cities concerning the con- duct of the citizens of New Orleans, during the epidemic which has just completed its orbit. A Journal, published in an Eastern city, where yellow fever once