The climate of the United States and its endemic influences. Based chiefly on the records of the Medical Department and Adjutant General's Office, United States Army / By Samuel Forry.
- Samuel Forry
- Date:
- 1842
Licence: Public Domain Mark
Credit: The climate of the United States and its endemic influences. Based chiefly on the records of the Medical Department and Adjutant General's Office, United States Army / By Samuel Forry. Source: Wellcome Collection.
387/394 page 379
![NOTE RELATIVE TO INTERMITTENT FEVER IN NEW ENGLAND. Since the last sheet has been in type, the author has become aware that the quo- tation on page 278, from Dr. Joseph M. Smith’s work on the etiology of epidemics, is not consonant with truth. In Holmes’ Prize Dissertation on the Intermittent Fever of New England, which the writer regrets not having previously seen, it is clearly established, contrary to the statement made by Dr. J. M. Smith, (which error was first promulgated by Professor Nathan Smith, in his work on Typhus Fever,) that intermittent fever has prevailed on the Connecticut river from our earliest colonial history. Dr. Holmes shows from historical evidence that, in 1671, fever and ague prevailed at Boston, and also at New Haven on its “first planting.” In regard to the latter place, the historian re- marks that “upon these southern coasts of New England it is not annual, as in Virginia, there being sundry years when there is nothing considerable of it, nor ordinarily so violent and universal.” The author’s attention has been drawn to these facts by Dr. Stephen W. Williams of Deerfield, Massachusetts, who and subsequently became converted into marshes and meadows, was in former years rife with fever and ague. Within the last sixty-five years, however, few cases have occurred, and at present it is unknown—a result ascribable to the gradual drying up ofthe marshes. Dr. Holmes’ Dissertation is accompanied with a map of New Eng- land, showing the localities in which intermittent fever has been at any time indige- nous; and the fact that but twenty-seven such points, including three on Lake Champlain, are laid down over this wide extent of territory, proves of itself the ex- treme rarity of the disease. Moreover, one-half of these localities are on the Con- necticut and Housatonic rivers,which have rich alluvial tracts, whilst along the shore of Long Island Sound, between the mouths of these two rivers, a narrow alluvial flat extends. These facts, then, instead of disproving, confirm the conclusion arrived at in this volume, that a region of primary formation with a sandy soil and an undu- lating surface, is exempt from fever and ague. The occasional prevalence of this disease in the valley of the Connecticut river, affords, indeed, a happy illustration of the ancient axiom of the exception proving the rule; for here, contrary to the gene- ral geological character of New England, we have a secondary instead of a pri- mary formation. ‘ 'The valley of the Connecticut,” says Bradford in his Illustrated Atlas, “‘is occupied by a basin of secondary rocks of about fifteen miles in average width, consisting of red shales, argillaceous sand-stones, and beds of conglomerates crossed by numerous dykes and ridges of trap.” As this formation has an alluvial superstratum, we discover a marked geological analogy between this valley and the Atlantic Plain on which malarial diseases are dominant. Now as it is remarked on page 280 that the region of New England, with little exception, has a primitive formation with a sandy and sterile soi], does it not afford a striking confirmation of the validity of the author’s deduction, to find by subsequent facts that this excepted portion is the one in which fever and ague have always been more or less gene- rated? As the disease is no longer known at Boston, Deerfield, and some of the other localities laid down on Holmes’ map, we are warranted in the belief that the endemic, wherever it may have been indigenous in the New England States, is attributable to peculiar local causes; as, for example, at Deerfield there formerly existed an accumulation of organic remains m the marshes and meadows formed by the bed of an ancient lake.](https://iiif.wellcomecollection.org/image/b33288379_0387.jp2/full/800%2C/0/default.jpg)
