Volume 1

Yellow fever : considered in its historical, pathological, etiological, and therapeutical relations. Including a sketch of the disease as it has occurred in Philadelphia from 1699 to 1854, with an examination of the connections between it and the fevers known under the same name in other parts of temperate, as well as in tropical, regions / By R. La Roche.

René La Roche

Date:: 1855

Credit: Yellow fever : considered in its historical, pathological, etiological, and therapeutical relations. Including a sketch of the disease as it has occurred in Philadelphia from 1699 to 1854, with an examination of the connections between it and the fevers known under the same name in other parts of temperate, as well as in tropical, regions / By R. La Roche. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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

112/680 page 56

Auj^nst, the pliysicians o])cncd tlie l)ody of a man who died in forty-eight hours from tlie first sensilde attack, mid found liis bowels and stomach quite mortified. From the Itth August to ITth September, the distemper continued very vio- lent, and baffled all the arts of the doctors. I stayed a few days at New York after your brother went, and there, by accident, I lighted on Dr. Warren’s Treatise of the yellow fever at Darbadoes, a book well known in London, and finding his description answer in most points to the Philadelphia sickness, I dispatched it immediately to Dr. Groeme, who was much assisted by it; and, after the arrival of the book, the distemper came to be well understood, so as to vield soon, in verv violent cases, to a free use of sudorifics—Dr. Warren’s specific for the cure. One particular symptom attended the fever in Phila- delphia which I suppose never appeared in Barbadoes, and that is a sup- pression of urine from the first attack. This was the case of poor ; and when the urine was suppressed, there is no instance of any one’s recovery. At present, we enjoy good health, and a fine season. According to the best accounts I am able to get, the number of the dead since the 1st of June amounts to no more than 250 ” Dr. Thomas Bond, a distinguished practitioner of that period, and whose name, conjointly with that of his brother. Dr. Phineas Bond, is found often honourably associated with that of our illustrious Franklin in works of benevo- lence and public utility, in the introductory lecture to a course of clinical medicine, delivered in December, 1766,‘ mentions his having witnessed the yellow fever five times since settling in Philadelphia, and adds : “ It was in the year ’411 first saw that horrid disease.” From Dr. Rush*^ we learn that the fever in question was referred to in a letter (now no longer to be found) of Dr, Franklin’s to his brother, who stopped at Burlington, on his way from Boston to this city, until assured by the doctor that a thunderstorm, which had cooled the air, had rendered it safe to come into the city. It is also re- ferred to in a memorandum appended by Dr. Kearsley, Sr., to the MS. copy of Dr. Mitchell’s account of the epidemic of Virginia in 1741, and which, after being quoted by Dr. Rush (p. 134), was published in Coxe’s Medical Museum (vol. i. pp. 20, 21), and subsequently in the Medical and Philoso- phical Register (vol. iv. p. 246, note). Dr. K. was long a practitioner in this city; and speaks of the disease as an eye-witness. But the most positive proof of the prevalence of an epidemic, and, at the same time, of its ravages, is found in the register of the Quaker’s cemetery. Under date of sixth month (0. S.), Rush says, it is there stated that “a malignant fever now spreads much;” and, a month after, “many who died of the above distemper were persons lively and strong, and in the prime of their time” (p. 134). The period of the year at which the fever made its appearance, the extent of the mortality it oecasioned in a few short months, the effect of cold in arresting its career of destruction, the analogy of the symptoms to those described by Dr. Warren, of Barbadoes, the oecurrence and fatal tendency of suppression ‘ Published from the Minutes of the Penusylvauia Hospital, in N. A. iv. 2 Fever of 1793, p. 134.

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