Remarks on the origin and mode of progression of yellow fever in Philadelphia based on the occurrence of the disease in that city and at the Lazaretto, in the months of July, August, and September, 1870 / by R. La Roche.
- René La Roche
- Date:
- [1871]
Licence: Public Domain Mark
Credit: Remarks on the origin and mode of progression of yellow fever in Philadelphia based on the occurrence of the disease in that city and at the Lazaretto, in the months of July, August, and September, 1870 / by R. La Roche. Source: Wellcome Collection.
58/98 page 52
![need scarcely be told that visitations of this kind are common in all places subject to extensive manifestations of the disease. Their occurrence in such cities and towns has been noted from time imme- morial—in some places annually between periods of epidemics; as well as in some localities where the fever has never or seldom assumed the epidemic form. Open we the professional records of Boston, New York, Baltimore, Charleston, Mobile, Savannah, New Orleans, Cadiz, Barcelona, the coast of Africa, the Gulf of Mexico, and everywhere the result will be found to be the same. In some places sporadic cases alone show themselves either annually or at longer or shorter intervals; in others they appear between periods of epidemic prevalence, which occur also at intervals of various duration. If we except Sir W. Pym, and a few others of the same school, physicians who are conversant with the yellow fever of the West Indies, whether they be contingent or absolute contagionists, or are opposed to that doctrine, have, from the days of Town and Desportes to our own, admitted, that the disease, such as it exists in those islands, is a native of the soil, and prevails more frequently there than anywhere else. And yet there is not one among them who does not know that the fever is not there of annual occurrence. If we open Desportes' excellent work on the diseases of St. Domingo, we shall find that in the course of the fourteen years he resided at the Cape, the place was free from the fever during five. At Martinique yellow fever did not appear from 182Y to 1838. Grrenada, when visited in 1793 by the epidemic described by Chisholm, had not suffered for thirty-one j^ears. Dominica was also exempt from 1817-1821 to 1838. Georgetown, Demerara, suffered severely in 1*193; next in 1803; then in 1819. From that year to 1831 the disease did not show itself in the epidemic form. But in each of these places— free as they may be from epidemic manifestation—s]poradic cases moi'e or less frequently break out, exhibiting all the characteristic symptoms of the disease and leading to its usual fatal results. Nor can such occurrences—longer or shorter intervals between epidemic manifestation of the disease and the annual or occasional appearance of sporadic cases during those periods of repose—prove matter of astonishment, seeing that similar events are observed in regard to other fevers to which yellow fever is closely allied. Every one knows in this country that although the bilious remittent fever, the endemic of many localities from one extremity to the other of our vast republic, appears in such places to a greater or less extent, every year at stated periods, seasons occur at which it does so in so trifling a degree as to attract little notice; and other](https://iiif.wellcomecollection.org/image/b20406551_0058.jp2/full/800%2C/0/default.jpg)
