On the Telloiu- Fever of Charleston. -^ 



"Attending to circumstances, necessarily and intimately 

 connected with the subject. For my own part, I 

 verily believe, that were our city to be kept as clean 

 as tlie drawing-room of a fashionable lady, and were 

 the waters we use as pure as those of Helicon, still 

 there would be no security against the ravages of this 

 direful hydra, this opprobrium medicorum^ while that 

 particular idiosyncrasy or diathesis of the atmosphere 

 obtains, which gives life to the disease. In what this 

 idiosyncrasy consists, I confess myself much at a loss 

 to determine. Were I to hazard a conjecture, I 

 might say that it probably depended on a peculiar 

 unknown modification of the atmosphere, evidently 

 the consequence of the heats of summer, connected 

 with putrid miasmata arising from thence : for the 

 disease has never been epidemic until after some 

 length of hot weather ; and, in confirmation of this, 

 we find, that a certain degree of cold never fails to 

 obliterate it, until the heat of the subsequent sum. 

 mer, under certain circumstances, again revives it 

 into action, 



I shall here take notice, that I have frequently ob- 

 served different idiosyncrasies or constitutions of the 

 atmosphere to produce different epidemics, which are 

 often varying. I well remember, between the years 

 1777 and 1781, that, among people of colour only, 

 an epidemic prevailed, which proved fatal to vast 

 numbers of them. It was not confined to any sea- 

 son, for I have seen it in the autumn, and in the 

 depth of winter. It was, by some, called the yellow- 

 fever, by otherg the camp-fever, with what propriety I 



