FE VER-FA CTORIES. 1 43 



FEVER -FACTOKIES. 



By F. L. OSWALD, M, D. 



THE prediction of the N'eio Orleans Medical Journal, that the vital 

 and material losses of the Southern States by the last epidemic 

 would exceed the costs of our Mexican War/ has been fully verified, 

 but by its very magnitude the calamity may prove a less unqualified 

 evil if it should help to open our ejes to the true nature and the origin 

 of what has too long been considered a mysterious and unavoidable 

 plague. 



The hope of solving the riddle of the periodicity and topographical 

 predilections of the fever-fiend suggested a careful comparison of the 

 pathological statistics of our Spanish- American neighbors with those 

 of our Southern lowlands ; and these studies have revealed some curi- 

 ous facts, which the correspondents of our medical periodicals have cor- 

 roborated rather than exjilained. 



It appears that a disease which our ablest physicians have described 

 as intensified malaria, has by no means confined itself to the malarious, 

 i. e., swampy regions of the Atlantic slope, but in a great majority of 

 cases may be traced to a city, or a well-drained but thickly-populated 

 district, where the dietetic and domestic habits of the Caucasian race 

 predominate over those of the American aborigines. Among many of 

 the Indian tribes that inhabit the marshy lowlands and humid coast- 

 forests of our continent, fevers are, on the other hand, wholly unknown ; 

 while Europeans who visit such regions, or natives who adopt Euro- 

 pean modes of life, become liable to a variety of enteric disorders. 



Vera Cruz, la Ciudad de los 3Iuertos, " the City of the Dead," as 

 the Mexicans call it, on account of the frequency of its yellow-fever 

 epidemics, is situated on a barren and extremely dry coast, remote 

 from all swamps, and surrounded by arid sand-hills ; while the natives 

 of the peninsula of Yucatan, with its swamps and inundated virgin 

 forests, are considered to be the healthiest and hardiest portion of the 

 Mexican population. La Guayra, Caracas, and Santiago de Cuba, in 

 spite of their mountainous environs, complain of the terrible regularity 

 of their autumnal epidemics ; but in the valley of the Amazon fevers 

 were unknown before the arrival of the European colonists, and are 

 still monopolized by the Creoles and negroes of the larger settlements. 

 The forest tribes of the Madeira, says Bonpland, cautioned the mis- 



' The territorial acquisitions of the United States in 1848 were achieved at a cost of 

 15,350 human lives, and a direct and indirect expense of 8123,000,000— a sum which 

 was more than repaid by the California revenues of the next ten years. Total deaths by 

 yellow fever from August 5 to October 5, 1878, 17,012. Direct and indirect losses (with- 

 out any prospective compensation) of the city of Xew Orleans alone, $16,000,000 — 

 about one-tenth of the loss total to the Mississippi Valley from Memphis to the Delta. 



