ADDITIONAL NOTES ON CONTAGION. 265 



Amer. Med. and Phil. Register t vol. 4. ; Needham's Sketch of the Medical Topography 

 of Onondaga, state of New- York. See Barton's Med. and Phys. Journ. 1st supplement* 



But we need not confine ourselves to European writers for information on this subject. 

 Similar facts have been observed in our own country, and in this city in particular, and 

 equally show the absurdity of resorting to vegetable or animal putrefaction as the source 

 of the malignant fever with which the United States have been recently visited. 



Adverting to the condition of the city of New- York anterior to the American revolu- 

 tion, and before a regular system of police regulations was adopted ; to the offensive state 

 of the town during the revolutionary war, when inhabited by the British troops ; to the 

 immense collection of foul materials of every sort in the cellars of the numerous 

 buildings destroyed by the great fire of 1776, during the whole of which period this city 

 enjoyed a total exemption from the pestilential fever, we must be convinced of the limited 

 and incorrect views of those who look no further for the origin of this evil. In like man- 

 ner, the offensive state of our slips, our wharves, and our market-places, until within a very 

 few years ; the putrefactive processes attendant upon our tanneries, morocco, starch, and 

 glue manufactories, slaughter-houses, tallow-chandleries, sugar-houses, &c. &c. the filthy 

 and neglected condition of our streets, and, we may add, of many of our burial grounds, 

 furnish incontestible evidence that these are innocent when considered as the primary 

 causes of the mortal epidemics which have desolated our cities. The influence of such an 

 impure state of the atmosphere, resulting from these various causes, as a secondary agent 

 in multiplying and diffusing the poison of fever when introduced, has already, I trust, been 

 made sufficiently manifest. 



Mr. Howard, in his remarks on the plague, (see History of Lazarettos, p. 43.) advert- 

 ing to the opinions of those who questioned the contagiousness of that disease, asks, " Have 

 not some of our professors sullied their names with such dangerous doctrines ? From 

 no other cause," he continues, " than the error of physicians, who constantly maintained 

 that the disease, then epidemic, wa3 not contagious, happened that terrible visitation 

 which, in 1743, ravaged the city of Messina and its vicinity, with the loss of above forty- 

 three thousand individuals, in the short space of only three months." 



May it not with equal propriety be asked, can the physicians of the United States, 

 who shall carefully have reflected upon the facts which have just been stated, and others 

 of a similar nature which might easily be adduced, persist in the belief they have ex- 

 pressed, that the pestilential fever that has appeared in our cities and seaport towns is 

 the product of decomposed animal and vegetable matter? 



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