Yellow Fever, Before and After the Discovery of America ]) 



The early history of yellow fever had for a long time been shrouded in. 

 mystery. Some authors, upon very slender grounds, attributed its first 

 authentic appearance on this side of the Atlantic to an importation from 

 Africa, through the slave-trade. Others attempted to indentify it with 

 diseases described in the Greek, Roman, or Arabic writers of ancient and 

 mediaeval ages ; a theory which Dr. Joseph Jones, of New Orleans, has taken 

 the pains to exclude in reviewing all the epidemics mentioned in the 

 European literature of those days. Finally, a third group, among whom we 

 find Dr. Stanford Cháillé, who presided, in 1879, over the U. S. Yellow 

 Fever Commission, inclined to the belief that our present yellow fever 

 is no other than the pestilence which decimated the Spanish colonists or 

 invaders upon their first arrival at Santo Domingo, Darien, Nombre de 

 Dios, and Vera Cruz ever since the days of Columbus, and which is 

 mentioned under the names of peste and pestilencia by contemporary 

 Spanish chroniclers. It was not, however, until seven or eight years ago 

 that light began to be thrown upon the subjet. Dr. Bérenger-Férand, in 

 Paris, and the writer of this paper, in Havana without any knowledge of 

 each other's researches, both presented about the same time a collection of 

 historical data tending in each case towards the same conclusions. Those 

 formulated in the two papers read by the writer before the Havana 

 Academy of Sciences may be thus summarized : — 



1. Before the discovery of America by Columbus, yellow fever was 

 endemic upon the Atlantic coast of New Spain (at Vera Cruz in particular) 

 and of Terra-firme. (Darien, Nombre de Dios). In these localities the 

 disease was probably perpetuated through the communications with the 

 colder and more elevated inland regions, whence the arrival of susceptible 

 subjects might enable the morbific agent to be incessantly reproduced. 



2. The Carib Indians of the West Indian Isles, during their frequent 

 excursions to the coast of Terra-firme, where they are supposed to have 

 procured their arrow-poison, must have picked up the germs of the peste 

 and carried it to their respective islands, developing new epidemies among 

 such subjects as were at hand and liable to contract the disease. 



3. In the island of Santo Domingo (Hispaniola), excepting perhaps, 



1) The Climatologist, Philadelphia, Pa., July 1892. 



