ICQ? Dr. Mac Culloch's Essay 07i the 



mond, where, as at Lewisham, there was one house known 

 to us. inasmuch as being intimate friends, where ten indivi- 

 duals at one time were suffering under this disease. 



We must not prolong this enumeration, since we might 

 easily occupy a dozen of our pages with similar details, rang- 

 ing, in fact, all over England ; but we must still observe, that 

 whatever was the pestilence last year, it promises to be much 

 greater in the present one. This is easily judged from the 

 manner in which the season has set in ; but still more decid- 

 edly from the extraordinary prevalence of ague in the spring ; 

 since that which is intermittent fever then, will be remittent 

 in the autumn, or rather, as the author has justly remarked, 

 there will scarcely be a definite season of vernal intermittent, 

 but the remittent will commence immediately, increasing in 

 extent and severity as the summer advances, and promising 

 to become, in the autumn, the greatest season of disease that 

 England has known for this century. 



As an example of this, it must suffice to enumerate two or 

 three facts, while these are as satisfactory for our purpose as 

 a thousand would be. The most general of these is, that 

 ague is at this moment extremely abundant where it was for- 

 merly so little known as not to be noticed, and that where 

 single cases used to occur, there are now hundreds. Thus 

 has it prevailed at Fulham and Ealing, and in the out- 

 skirts of London, and even in the town itself; and thus does 

 it so prevail at Greenwich, Deptford, and in the associated 

 vicinity, that a medical friend informs us, that it comprises 

 more than two-thirds of his entire practice, which is very 

 extensive ; whereas a few years ago he had rarely a patient 

 in a year. Thus also in the Military Hospital at Woolwich, 

 there were in the spring three hundred patients with this 

 disease ; while in former times, we are assured, that an ague 

 was scarcely known once in five or six years. 



These are a few of the facts within our knowledge, but not 

 one in a thousand, which evince the necessity of the publica- 

 .tion before us ; a book which seems to have been singularly 

 well-timed, in as far as its purpose is, by a dissection of the 

 sources of malaria, to diminish the ravages of both these 

 kinds of fevers. And in this view we consider it a work of 

 very considerable utility, inasmuch as it points out all the 

 needful circumstances, as to prevention, in great detail; while 

 these seemed particularly called for in England, from the 

 entire and not less singular neglect which this subject has 

 jBxperienced, not only from the people at large, but from the 

 medical profession. Beyond this, all that we need say of 



