Gazette Of The United States, & Philadelphia Daily Advertiser

For the Gazette of the United States.

MR. BENJAMIN WYNKOOP.

October 10th, 1797.

SIR,

IN the last letter I addressed to you, I omitted mentioning this account given by Dr. Chotte, of the origin of a contagious yellow fever at Senegal in the year 1778.

"On the 4th of August (says Dr. Chotte) in the year 1778, a contagious fever, distinguished by yellowness of the surface of the body and black vomiting, made its appearance in a hospital at Senegal in Africa, at a time when the rains were heavy and the island was overflowed with water, the contagion of which was brought from Goree, a garrison belonging to the French, by some black messengers. The contagion of this fever was so active, and the disease so mortal, that of 92 white people who were on the island, only 33 were alive when the French invaded it in January 1779, and 8 of these were hardly able to walk. Two of them were afterwards drowned in crossing the bar of Senegal-and three died on their passage to France." In this fever the eyes were red and shining at the beginning but became yellow in the course of the disease when it proved mortal &c.

If the facts and arguments which have been offered in the course of our correspondence, are not sufficient to convince every impartial enquirer that the malignant fever, which has occasioned such deplorable mortality in different places since the year 1793, did not originate from the effluvia of vegetable putrefaction; but from febrile contagion, generated originally in the confined and impure air of ships, and imported from the West-Indies, additional arguments, in proof of this, may be drawn from the disease having always made its first appearance in the seaport towns, and in families that reside or transact business near to the wharfs frequented by seamen; from its having been confined, for some time, to the neighborhood where it first appeared; from its having been afterwards propagated by contagion, and no other way, as evident from all those escaping who secluded themselves from all intercourse with the deceased; as was remarkably the case with 200 prisoners confined in the jail in 1793, the pensioners in the alms house, and the patients in the hospital: and from its not ceasing to spread, after heavy rains, while the atmosphere continues warm, which is invariably the case with bilious fevers occasioned by putrid vegetable effluvia.

Physicians, as well as philosophers, are too apt to ascribe any extraordinary effect to a coincidence or accidental occurrence of circumstances totally independent and unconnected with each other, instead of tracing it to its genuine and necessary source. Thus in 1793, because a quantity of damaged coffee happened to lay in a dock near the neighborhood where the disease first appeared, it was ascribed to that circumstance, though from the nature of the disease, it could not possibly have had any more connection with it, than a quantity of millstones that lay in the same neighborhood. To favor this opinion, the season was called a tropical one, though dry and in every other respect one of the most healthy that we had had for several years. In 1795, when the season was cool and wet, some of the very learned physicians of New-York ascribed it to the mud of the docks, and, in the face of glaring facts, denied that it was contagious, though it was proved by unquestionable facts that it was introduced from Port-au-Prince by the brig Zephyr.* -And the present season, because the streets and wharfs were remarkably clean at the time the disease appeared in this city, and the atmosphere has been frequently refreshed with heavy rains, which cleared the air of all impurities and rendered it temperate and wholesome, and no other coincidence could be discovered, it is ascribed to the bilge water of a single merchant-ship.

To conclude, if our climate has become so unwholesome and impure as to convert the effluvia of a few putrid vegetables into a pestilential and contagious nature, we ought to desert our devoted cities, and seek an asylum in a climate where we might be secure from such a deplorable calamity; for in this we never could be safe, so long as a vegetable is suffered to rot in our streets, or a vessel with bilge water is permitted to enter our ports. But as there are no facts but imaginary ones in support of a doctrine so injurious to the reputation of our climate, and consequently to the interest of our commerce, I hope you will no longer persist in your endeavors to give currency, to so palpable as well as injurious an error.

I am, with all due respect,

Your obedient servant,
WILLIAM CURRIE.

*See letter from the New-York board of health, published in Mr. Brown's paper of the 24th of September, 1795.