YELLOW FEVER IX SOUTHERN" CITIES. Wt 



The town has been very thoroughly cleansed, and if the recent 

 hurricane has visited Nassau, as it probably has, the germs of 

 the disease will be destroyed." It is, therefore, now altogether 

 probable, that the sickness which occurred in Nassau in the win- 

 ter and spring of 1880, was of the yellow fever type. That it 

 did not more generally prevail, is no doubt due to the fact that 

 Nassau is so well ventilated with ocean winds. In certain locali- 

 ties there existed conditions favorable to its spread, and in these 

 the fever germs took root, so that the disease was sporadic and 

 not pestilential, and the result of local causes. 



The fact should in this connection be stated, as a matter of 

 justice to Nassau, that all the cities of the Southern States and 

 of the West India Islands, have been occasionally subject to the 

 same disease. 



An apparently intelligent and well-informed correspondent of 

 " The Semi-Tropical," — a monthly magazine formerly published 

 in Jacksonville, Florida — in the December numl^er of that jieri- 

 odical for 1877, gives some instances of the prevalence of this 

 disease which are worthy of consideration. He says: " In 1857, 

 Jacksonville was visited by a fatal epidemic, generated by the 

 opening of the railroad through a swamjo hole in the heart of 

 a little hamlet during the warm season, when the exhalations 

 were foetid with miasma. It was confined at first to those resid- 

 ing in the immediate vicinity of this swamp, and radiated from 

 (hat center, but did not cross the river. It was as destructive 

 as yellow fever, though in many respects, it lacked some of the 

 essential features of that disease. It proved fatal to an alarming 

 degree, but more from the impossibility of securing nurses and 

 ])ropcr assistance, than from any necessity of the disease." He 

 adds that before that, yellow fever cases from the West Indies 

 had not spread. 



He also refers to **a few fatal cases of wliat is teiined in the 



