An essay on the non-existence of malaria : especially as a cause of intermittent and remittent bilious fevers : read before the Central Medical Society of Georgia, December 3, 1828 / by Alexander Jones.

  • Alexander Jones
Date:
1829
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Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: An essay on the non-existence of malaria : especially as a cause of intermittent and remittent bilious fevers : read before the Central Medical Society of Georgia, December 3, 1828 / by Alexander Jones. 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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    6nd them a healthy people, although enveloped in damps and fogs, Itnly has, comparatively, a veiy damp atmosphere ; particularly so when put in competition with many other parts of the world. This is not strange, when we view the situation of that country, surround* ed on two sides by the sea, and checkered with many fine rivers, which flow through fertile vallies, interspersed with extensive tracts of swamp or marsh lands. It is not wonderful that the Italians, in such a damp country, half ctad and half starved, should be a sickly puny race of beings. We might here ask the miasmatist, why it is, in a country like Holland, where Dr. McCulloch states malaria exists so fieely, as frequently to be carried over to England on an east wind, it has so little effect on the healthy, robust Germans who are immersed in it—while in Italy, which Dr. Hays says pos- sesses 'k comparatively a dry sky, the people should be so puny and sickly, seeing, as Dr. Hays and Dr. McCulloch assert, moisture is essential to the propagation of malaria 1 (q) No fact is better established than the difficulty, and fre- quently the impossibility of curing fever patients in a malaria dis- trict, during the malaria season. The moment they go into the night air a relapse takes place. [Because perspiration is again checked.] '* In Italy, when the peasants who migrate from the mountains to the malaria districts, during harvest, as laborers, are attacked with fever, they are instantly sent home to a drier atmos- phere.— Experience has proved that recovery is almost a miracle if they remain.—H. Such experience differs very widely, from that held by Dr. Hays' countrymen, and particularly the Southern physicians of the United States, where miasmatists locate as much malaria, as in any other part of the Globe. We have no hesitation in saying (as we know the experience of every Southern physician will bear us out in it) that hundreds of cases of intermittens, produced as all miasmatists agree, bv malaria, are cured every season, at the very spot where they are contracted. Hundreds are cured by a simple emetic, or purge, acting revulsively on the skin, or at most, with a few doses of quinine superadded. Many are cured with red pepper tea do- mestically prescribed. All stimulants act more or less upon the skin, as every sudorific is m< re or less stimulating in its properties. Of the other kind of fever, bilious remittent, it is cured more than nine times out often, and that in the very tract of country where it is generated. It is true, relapses are liable to occur among us in these diseases, but it is not from a re-application of malaria, (which ought never to cease acting, if it exist,) but from irregularities in diet, or exposure to a damp air, by which means the perspiration may again be suppressed after it had been restored. The cases which terminate fatally, or linger in an uncured state, are generally those that labor under visceral engorgements, or glandular derangements. lMiev are not killed, nor kept sick by an excess, or the constant presence of malaria. (r) What evidence is there of this?—H. Take a stick, and go to a pond of standing water, in Georgia or South-Carolina, in December or Januaty, and stir the bottom well,
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