FEVER-FACTORIES. 147 



The antidotal resources of Nature counteract the evil for a while • 

 diarrhoea, retching, and intermittent fevers, discover her efforts to secrete 

 an indigestible substance ; the suicidal diet is modified, in quantity at 

 least, by nausea and loss of appetite, and the periodical north winds 

 that reduce the summer temperature of our Southern States by twenty 

 or thirty degrees may help to postpone the crisis for weeks and 

 months. But if that palliative fails, and the devotee of established 

 customs pursues his course with intrepid fanaticism, the barriers of life 

 yield at last, and Nature ends an evil which she cannot cure. The 

 direct cause of yellow fever is the inability of the vital power to with- 

 stand the double influence of moist heat from within and without. 



In all zymotic diseases the blood passes through the incipient stao-es 

 of fermentation, incited, perliaps, by floating animal or vegetable germs 

 but favored by and depending upon the enteric condition of each indi- 

 vidual. The morbid humors begin to ferment,' the progress of decom- 

 position separates the red blood-globules from the serum ; the first 

 accumulate in the digestive apparatus and are discharged in that vomit 

 of cruor which marks the advanced stages of yellow fever and cholera, 

 while the absence of the coloring particles from the circulating blood 

 tinges the skin with a yellowish hue. The convulsion of the bowels 

 reacts on the brain, produces violent headaches, coma, perhaps, or 

 delirium, and paroxysms of nausea, and ends by utter exhaustion and 

 death. It is notorious that the bodies of the victims of yellow fever 

 need immediate interment on account of the swiftness with which pu- 

 trefaction begins, or rather ends, its work. 



As its name implies, a fever epidemic is a contagious disease, and it 

 cannot be denied that by prompt removal from the infected atmosphere 

 innumerable candidates of the winding-sheet might be saved ; but it is 

 quite as certain that even persons of a frail constitution, but innocent 

 of dietetic sins, may breathe with impunity the air in which thousands 

 of their stricken fellow-citizens have recently expired. Everywhere the 

 mortality lists show a great preponderance of males over females, of 

 men of sedentary pursuits over open-air laborers, and of epicures over 

 ascetics. Catholic seminarists, Sisters of Charity, vegetarians, and 

 tramps, have enjoyed a remarkable immunity, owing to their voluntary 

 or involuntary habits of abstinence. Worried physicians, spectral old 

 spinsters, and smoke-dried presbyters, have generally survived, while 

 corpulent beer-brewers, lusty landlords, and chubby butcher-boys, went 

 down like grass under a sweeping scythe ; and the local papers of New 

 Orleans and Vicksburg have repeatedly called attention to the fact 

 that the business-men who declined to close either their earthly career 

 or their stores were mostly Italians and Jews. 



The lessons of the last epidemic find numerous precedents in the 



' That the blood-changes in zymotic diseases are catalytic is sufficiently proved by the 

 prophylactic power of cold and of the same antiseptics that (vould arrest an inchoate 

 process of fermentation. 



