131 



instances mentioned by Dr. Kennedy, and adverted to by Drs. Stokes 

 and Davidson? 



The post-mortem examinations made at the New York Hospitals, 

 during the last year, might be deemed sufficient, apart from all other 

 testimony, to establish the identity of typhus and typhoid fever. In 

 the cases of ship fever, a pure form of typhus, a disease unquestion- 

 ably originating in every instance fr$m the same poison, follicular 

 disease of the intestines was found after death in some cases, and not 

 in others. Dr. Stone tells us, in the New York Annalist,* that, in 

 four weeks, ending May 12th, 1847, there were admitted into the 

 Bellevue Hospital about four hundred and sixty-six cases, sick of 

 typhus; and he says that "the most constant anatomical lesion which 

 I have found in the examination of about twenty-five of those who 

 have died, is an enlargement and softening of the spleen. Peyer's 

 glands were found more or less diseased in about one-fourth of these 

 cases, and the heart more or less softened in a somewhat larger pro- 

 portion." The same gentleman, in another communication, published 

 in the New York Journal of 3£edicine,^ relating to the same fever, 

 gives the following among his other conclusions, drawn from observa- 

 tions of the disease in New York and New England: " That typhus 

 and typhoid fever, so called, are identical." Professor Clark, in 

 illustrating the morbid anatomy of typhus, at a meeting of the New 

 York Pathological Society, Feb. 23, 1848, stated, in reference to a 

 particular hospital case, that "the usual old typhoid lesion affected 

 the intestines with the common appearance of the present epidemic." 

 " This case," he said, " allies the present epidemic with the typhoid 

 fever."| At a meeting of the same society, held March 8, 1848, 

 Dr. Swett made the following interesting statement. He said, " that 

 fever had occurred at the Bloomingdale Lunatic Asylum, carried 

 thither by an insane emigrant, and fifteen persons had been attacked 

 with it. Nine or ten had come to the hospital, and two had been 

 examined post-mortem. In the first there were no lesions of any 

 kind : in the second, there were ulcerations of the small intestines." 

 " Where the ulcers existed, instead of attacking Peyer's glands in 

 the middle, they attacked the edges, extending two or three feet up 

 the intestine, and then disappearing. Some had cicatrized, and 

 some were cicatrizing. Both cases originated from ship fever in a 

 very cleanly and healthy set of men ; so that it seems as if the same 



* Vol. i. p. 383, No. for May 15, 1847. 



t Vol. x. p. 176, No. for March, 1848. J Annalist, Vol. ii. p. 249. 



