The Epidemic Summer

LIST OF INTERMENTS IN ALL THE CEMETERIES OF NEW ORLEANS,
FROM THE FIRST OF MAY TO THE FIRST OF NOVEMBER, 1853.
TOGETHER WITH
NAMES AND AGES OF DECEASED, PLACES OF NATIVITY, CAUSES OF DEATHS, DATE OF INTERMENT
AND NAME OF CEMETERY IN WHICH INTERRED.
ALPHABETICALLY ARRANGED.
TO WHICH ARE ADDED
A REVIEW OF THE YELLOW FEVER, ITS CAUSES, ETC., AND AN INTERESTING AND USEFUL
ABSTRACT OF MORTUARY STATISTICS.
 
NEW ORLEANS
PUBLISHED BY THE PROPRIETOR OF THE TRUE DELTA,
OFFICE NO, 103 ST CHARLES ST. 1853.
Entered according to Act of Congress, in the year l853, by JOHN MAGINNS, in the Office of the Clerk of the District Court of the United States, for the Eastern District of Louisiana.
 
A Review of the Yellow Fever, It�s Causes, Etc.
WITH SOME REMARKS ON HYGIENE.
BY J. S. M�FARLANE, M. D.
The reappearance of yellow fever in New Orleans, in an epidemic form, after an absence of six years, has been productive of severe disappointment, and immeasurable grief to her inhabitants, if not to the whole civilized world.
The uncommon intermission of six years in our periodical visitations had inspired our citizens with the most confident but delusive anticipations of a perpetual exemption from yellow fever, in an epidemic form, thereafter. And yet there were no just or reasonable foundations for such wild and chimerical expectations.
It is true, that within late years, large numbers of medical gentlemen, of vast erudition and amazing professional talents and attainments, had flocked to New Orleans, for the benevolent purpose of contributing their generous aid to its future protection from the deadly assaults of the fell tyrant, yellow fever.
Voluminous reports, replete with highly scientific illustrations, had been presented, ponderous volumes had been written, calculated to demonstrate that under the future guidance of the new and more enlightened pilots who had seized the helm, the hygienic condition of our city would be meliorated to such an unparalleled degree, that yellow fever and cholera were to fly shrieking to India and Rio Janeiro; and New Orleans, emancipated under their superior management, from all the ills which had formerly harassed and oppressed her, was to become healthy and delightful as the garden of Eden.
These fascinating illusions were scattered broadcast throughout the United States, and the system of immigration to New Orleans underwent, within the last few years, a complete change.
Formerly isolated young men seeking to improve their fortunes, took their lives in their hands and cast in their lot among us; but within later years, stimulated by the delusive prospects of security which were so recklessly set before them, whole families, abandoning their household gods, and scattering to the winds the ashes of their domestic altars, turned their backs upon their native homes, and hurried to this El Dorado, reckless of consequences and heedless of all precautions.
Added to this, from the immense foreign immigration to the United States, large numbers of strangers had arrived in New Orleans, a prominent seaport; many in a destitute-condition, and finding high wages and good prospects, had settled in our city.
These and other circumstances, such as the entire absence of apprehension, which formerly drove so many from our city, at the approach of summer, had made so large an addition to our population, that it perhaps would not be a very extravagant calculation to estimate, that at the commencement of the late epidemic, yellow fever, there were not less than from thirty-five to forty thousand persons in New Orleans, who were strangers to its climate and liable to its periodical epidemic diseases.
The vast influx of strangers has always been considered by judicious observers, a source of danger to cities, and during the late World's Fair, in London, serious apprehensions were entertained, based upon past experience, and the records of history, that the accumulation of so many strangers in that city would be productive of plague or some desolating pestilence among her inhabitants. These apprehensions were not predicated upon the fear that pestilential diseases would be introduced by the strangers who were expected to visit the city of London, but that they would be engendered by the accumulation of a dense mass of human beings from every quarter of the world crowded together into the already densely populated metropolis, forming a heterogeneous collection of incompatible social elements, exactly resembling the population of New Orleans, at the commencement of the late epidemic.
But what are the warnings of history, or the teachings of experience to the rabid enthusiast?�he who, closing his eyes to the transitory circumstances to which the absence of yellow fever for the last six years can only be reasonably ascribed, dreams of health and security to the citizen and stranger from subterranean drainage, deepened privies, ventilated houses and leveled lots, aided by a denuded and drained morass, of thirty or forty miles in extent, which
has not felt the burning ardor of a vertical sun for at least one hundred years.*
What can be expected from the wild vagaries of monomaniacs, who, wrapped in halcyon delusions, while they overlook the evils and dangers which surround them, obstinately refuse to contemplate the fact that cities, whose hygienic police almost approach perfection, possessing subterranean drainage, with a soil immeasurably less calculated to produce disease than ours, and possessing a fixed resident refined population, have for ages been periodically devastated by epidemic yellow fevers.
It would require one hundred years of steady, rational perseverance in hygienic police, to bring the city of New Orleans up to even the natural standard of salubrity of Charleston, Mobile, Pensacola or Galveston, and these cities are periodically visited by yellow fever; yet our Solons talk as if they could convert New Orleans into a terrestrial paradise in a few months.
To hear the ravings, and read the lucubration�s of the visionaries who have done so much and are about to do so much more for the health of New Orleans, as to the effects of filthy streets, moisture and shallow privies, in the creation of yellow fever and cholera; and considering the effluvia and want of ventilation, it would appear not the least miraculous, in an age of miracles, that a virulent and pestilential yellow fever had not broken out in Noah's Ark, or that his family had not been swept away by cholera, on the retrogression of the waters of the deluge, and thus, by exterminating our race at one fell swoop, forever prevented the magnificent hygienic blessings which our public-spirited and philanthropic benefactors intend hereafter to confer upon us.
There is, however, one indisputable fact which cannot be overlooked by the medical philosopher.
It is, that yellow fever has gradually abandoned certain latitudes and localities which were formerly subject to its frequent visitations, but these changes are no more to be ascribed to the puny efforts of hygienic exertions, or police regulations, than its appearance within a few years past in large and populous cities, which it had never formerly visited; on the contrary, it maybe safely averred, that there are at present, in the cities of New York and Philadelphia, ten thousand times more poverty, misery and crime�ten thousand times more filth, offal and impurity, than there were when those cities were habitually visited by desolating yellow fever, while we possess no data which enables us to indicate that the hygienic police of Rio Janeiro is in the slightest degree more neglected than it has been for an hundred years past.
In all those large cities of the United States, where yellow fever formerly prevailed, as in New Orleans, it grew with the growth and strengthened with the strength of an increasing, but heterogeneous and incompatible population, and it never appeared in this city until our own countrymen began to settle here, some fifty years since.
In the course of years in other cities, it has diminished in frequency and severity; and in time, as the population became more homogeneous, it gradually subsided, until, in the most of them, it has become almost extinct. Such, we may humbly hope, will eventually be the case in New Orleans; but let us not confide the health and destinies of our city to the hands of hygienic visionaries.
It is, perhaps, a safe maxim to distrust first impressions�to do nothing in a hurry. In former years, yellow fever was referred to the unpaved streets�the decaying gunwales of flat-boats, which formed our only sidewalks, and to our low wooden and decomposable dwellings, and our exposed batture.
These causes have, to a great extent, been removed at an awful and almost ruinous cost to the inhabitants.
Our streets have been paved with granite, commodious brick sidewalks have been laid, magnificent and indestructible mansions and palaces have usurped the place of our low and perishable buildings, and costly wharves protect the batture from elemental influences.
And what has been the result? Yellow fever has, within the present year, assumed a form infinitely more aggravated, commencing earlier and lingering later than it ever did before.
What terminated its career then? Have equinoctial tempests or elemental commotions �
* It is a remarkable fact, that about six years since, a large portion of the swamp in the rear of New Orleans was rapidly exposed by felling the tress and draining off the water, and forthwith, violent remittent and intermittent fevers became prevalent, until last summer.
         Have frosts, snows or reduced temperature, duly commissioned, been empowered to say to the fell destroyer, "so far shalt thou go and no farther?" No! nothing of the kind has occurred. Do not our shallow privies, our unventilated hovels, our stagnant pools and undrained lots still exist?
         Are not all the causes, moisture, filth, offal and vegetable decomposition � which our wise teachers inform us engendered yellow fever last summer � do they not all still exist, even to an elevated temperature ?
         Who, then, will explain, that in a city where one short month before, a devastating epidemic yellow fever was cutting off two hundred persons per day, that in "a little month" afterwards, when sporadic cases were still frequent, that thousands of strangers entered our city, inhabited the same chambers and occupied the same beds, where, but a few days before, hundreds of victims had poured out their lives with fatal black vomit ; or found an asylum in hovels, which had never felt the vivifying influence of ventilation since their first erection, and all this with perfect impunity.
         It is with all the lights before us, an incomprehensible mystery.
         These remarks are not made in a captious spirit, nor are the opinions which I feel bound
to proclaim, adopted to impede the march of rational improvement, or to throw obstacles in the way of sober and practical reformation.
         In reference to the growing importance and future destinies of this great emporium of population and commerce, it is perfectly within the scope of sound and wholesome legislation to enact laws by which all necessary amendments in our condition shall be accomplished progressively and systematically.
 
         Let no house, says common sense, be erected over pools of standing water, or without such elevation of the soil beneath as shall prevent one from collecting there in future.
 
         Let privies be dug hereafter at a standard depth, if deemed necessary; let the streets, yards, and, indeed, every portion of the city be cleansed and purified, and kept so, and, in short, let every necessary reform be accomplished under the superintendence of capable functionaries, with proper qualifications, and, if necessary, under appropriate penalties.
         These hygienic reforms are due to our own comfort and enjoyment; they are just, proper and meritorious; our own self-respect should encourage them, and they are in accordance with the civilization and refinement of the age, although they will never arrest the visitations of yellow fever � but do not, in a moment of terror and excitement, give the lives and property of the people of New Orleans over, bound hand and foot, to the tender mercies of medical fanatics, with power to enter our houses, or perchance to tear them down, if not erected in accordance with the standard which their wild imaginations may induce them to adopt � or to invade our privacy and interfere with every domestic right, privilege and regulation.
         The bill for the establishment of a "Health Department" is taken altogether an ex post facto act of legislation, onerous and extravagant in every particular; it is replete with evils to our citizens and will prove a curse instead of a blessing, and should rouse the people to a determined opposition.
         Such wild and chimerical schemes have been projected before this, and a lack of cool and steady legislation has accomplished immitigable evils.
         In a period of comparative calm Quarantine laws were formerly enacted � in haste after a
desolating epidemic, having been found to be useless, they were abolished, and now our rulers are invoked by the wise men of the East, who have come amongst us, to reenact them. Let them pause and ponder well before they do so.
         But above all, do not permit the perpetual solicitations of closet dreamers to induce our
authorities, without proper precautions, hastily to lay bare the fifty miles of swamp which constitute the rear of our city; if it be done, depend upon it, they will rue it when too late.*
         While on this subject, it may not, perhaps, be irrelevant to make the following statement : Shortly after the dreadful cholera which devastated New Orleans in 1832, I had the honor of being elected Alderman of the First Ward (comprised between Canal and St. Louis streets,) to fill the seat which had been previously occupied by Col. Wm. Christy.
         Of course great alarm and excitement existed in relation to the terrible visitation with which � our city had so recently been afflicted. Among other projects for meliorating our condition, the draining and reclamation of the swamp in the rear of the city, was included, and the Draining Company was established.
         I, as a medical man, was consulted on the subject.
         I suggested, if the attempt were undertaken, that the work should commence at Lake New Orleans, in latitude 29 deg. 57 min. 30 sec, is situated on the left bank of the Mississippi. With the adjacent towns and villages, having the same topographical peculiarities, it occupies a longitudinal space; of more than ten miles, extending back from the river about half a mile. The remaining space, from the rear of the city to Lake Pontchartrain, from four to five miles, is a pestiferous swamp, filled with funereal looking cypress trees, and generally covered with water.
         Pontchartrain, to levee a section at a time along the margin of the Lake, to remove the trees, drain off the water and fill the enclosed space with soil, excavated from the Lake shore, which would furnish inexhaustible supplies; this course to be pursued laterally to the extent to which the company intended to progress, and then to proceed towards the city in the same manner, a section at a time, employing temporary and portable railroads, as the work receded farther from the lake and approached the city, but still preserving the intervening curtain of trees, with their impervious festoons of moss always intact and inviolate, and the water which covered the swamp undisturbed, so as to protect the inhabitants of New Orleans from the pestilential exhalations from the denuded swamps, as deadly as those of the Pontine marshes, or the deleterious consequences which might be apprehended from the proximity of an extensive and humid plain of so great an extent, should the work be prosecuted with rapidity. But my colleagues were astonished at the calmness of the proposition, and its prospective character; it would take years to accomplish, and something must be done at once; the sanitary furor was at its zenith, as it is at present, and nothing would do but immediate and universal exposure and reclamation of the swamp from the city to the lake, and now we have the consolation of reflecting that instead of a beautiful and level esplanade, extending from the city to the lake, susceptible of complete and perfect drainage, covered with flourishing farms and gardens, which those at the termini of the various roads to the lake have demonstrated to be of unusual fertility, ornamented with spacious and magnificent parks, and adorned with picturesque cottages and gorgeous palatial residences; thus forming a permanent basis to the city of New Orleans; and all at a cost not, perhaps, much exceeding the perpetual labor and expense of the draining machines which have been necessarily employed ever since; we occupy but a narrow strip along the margin of the river, receding constantly and indefinitely from the centre of business.
         And now, after rivaling the labor of the Danaides for nearly twenty years, nothing of any
importance or utility has been accomplished, and the old dreary morass still glares out upon our inhabitants as if watching for and ready, if disturbed, to spring upon its prey; and a fertile subject to awaken anew the feverish impetuosity of a new set of misguided enthusiasts; and such will forever be the consequence of hasty and undigested legislation.
         There is no fact better substantiated in medicine, than the deleterious results of a combination of heat, moisture and vegetable decomposition, in the production of intermittent, remittent, lake, swamp, typhoid and congestive fevers, and in the deadly morass in the rear of our city, we have those causes combined in fruition, and I do not hesitate to declare it as my solemn conviction, that if urged on by the clamorous importunity of ignorant advisers, or infatuated enthusiasts, our City Council permit themselves to be driven into a hasty and reckless exposure of the swamp, they will inflict an injury on New Orleans far transcending in severity all the periodical epidemics to which she has been heretofore subjected; because permanent; an injury which will be felt by our children and children's children for a century to come.
         Besides, these fitful and spasmodic hygienic efforts, appearing like the results of terror or
perturbation, are undignified and unworthy the high purpose and firm resolve which should characterize the proceedings of a calm and intelligent deliberative body; a cool, steady and unfaltering determination to do all that can be accomplished to meliorate the sanitary condition of our city, and to protect our citizens from danger, should mark the action of our municipal councils. Let this course be pursued with a moderate but unflagging fixidity of purpose, and in due time every necessary; object will be accomplished, and our citizens, so far as human efforts can achieve it, be rendered secure ; but no turmoil, no confusion, no hasty legislation of stringent application and doubtful utility. Let everything be done "with decency and in order."
         One inevitable evil of hasty legislation on the subject of hygiene is, that after a time the
people not perceiving benefits commensurate with the labor and expense: with the disappointment of the extravagant hopes which have been excited, public enthusiasm cools down, and the clamorous demagogue who expected to be borne into power on the wave of popular excitement; finding that it can no longer be made available abandons his exertions, � general indifference succeeds � the whole affair becomes obsolete, and no permanent good is accomplished. Such I fear will be the result of the present paroxysm. In Hygiene or - sanitary legislation, each successive step should be the precursor of another but "too much should not be undertaken at once, � nothing should be at first attempted which could harass or oppress the citizen, and render improvements irksome offensive or unpopular, � improvements should be so conducted that the people and their functionaries should accord in feeling, and thus, moved by the same aspirations, they will proceed cheerfully hand in hand, in the accomplishment of the great and beneficent objects which they mutually have in view, and thus operating together, all they desire will much more certainly be affected.  
         Yellow fever is a disease sui generis, and unlike all other diseases, and in vain have all the
enlightened nations of the world made the most powerful exertions to disarm it of its terrors, In vain have the most magnificent rewards been offered for a mode of treatment, or prophylaxis action system which shall protract or relieve the human family from its deadly ravages. � In vain have Medical Commissions consisting of the most able and enlightened physicians with a devotedness peculiar to our profession and with the courage and constancy of a forlorn hope, leaving their salubrious abodes, hurried to the dread seats of pestilence, and offered up their lives to the advancement of our profession and the good of mankind. � Nothing absolutely nothing has yet been accomplished. And why? Because nothing in relation to the specific
character and successful treatment of yellow fever can be acquired by books. It is at the bedside alone that the direful disease can be known, for each particular case forms the subject of a distinct and independent study apart from all others.
         What instructions or beneficial ideas can we convey to the physician at a distance of the
horribly insidious disease when we describe a patient with a cool and moist skin, a calm and regular pulse, quiet respiration, a clear and intelligent eye, and a lively and vigorous intellect, free from all pain, and apparently abundant excretions from every emunctory, and yet his earthly destiny is absolutely set and sealed, and his claims to be an inhabitant of this
world as effectually closed as if the clods of the valley were already rumbling on his coffin.
         And there is perhaps nothing to give a key to this horrible mystery, to the uninitiated, and to the medical attendant nothing, except on examining his secretions they will be found to be colorless, odorless, and watery, with a slight floccula floating on the surface, and an occasional outburst of the deadly herald black vomit.
         And these are the cases that daily meet the eye of the medical practioner, during an epidemic yellow fever.
         Is there then anything surprising in the fact that nothing comprehensible or profitable, in the management of yellow fever, has ever yet been written, and that all the various systems which have from time to time been ushered forth with so much confidence by those who had never seen the disease have regularly exploded, and perished still-born.
         We are therefore as yet not even at the threshold of science, in our knowledge of the nature and treatment of yellow fever; every effort, so far as proclaimed to the world, has been but the futile struggles of empiricism, � a succession of desperate experiments.
         After these candid acknowledgements, it is hardly to be expected that I should pretend to offer a system of successful practice, where all others have so signally failed, nor will the limits of this paper permit me to elaborate much on this branch of the subject.
         Suffice it to say that in a very long and extensive practice in yellow fever, I have never
seen a patient die where the intestinal excretions have preserved a natural character, hence my whole object in the treatment has been to preserve the integrity of the digestive functions. If the physician can accomplish this, all other symptoms will speedily subside and the patient soon recover.
         Nor can I sufficiently deprecate the use of Castor Oil as an aperient so universally employed
by physicians and families in the early stages of yellow fever during the past summer. Never do I recollect being called to a single case (except in intelligent and confiding families who would do nothing without the advice of a physician,) where the patient had not taken a dose of Castor Oil, and rarely did I confer with physicians without being informed that they had commenced the treatment of their cases with a dose of Castor Oil. The consequence too often was that from the nauseous character of the remedy, and the disgust with which it addresses itself to the palate and imagination of most patients, but above all from its acrimony, it was frequently rejected; it had then to be repeated; often with the same result, by which hours full of destiny were lost, and permanent irritability of the stomach was established, which could never be controlled until black vomit superseded, and death closed the melancholy scene.
         Where the Castor Oil was retained hyper-catharsis with gastric and intestinal irritability, too frequently ensued, the premonitory harbingers of the same fatal consequences.
         It may appear to the unreflecting unwarrantable captious and fastidious to condemn the employment of Castor Oil in yellow fever, but when we recollect that the pulpy portion of the paluia christi bean, from which the Castor Oil is obtained is surrounded and closely invested with a cuticle or skin, consisting of one of the most acrid and virulent emetics in the world, and which I have more than once known to produce actual gastro-enteritis endangering life, and when we reflect on the tremendous pressure to which the bean including this acrid investment in the preparation of Castor Oil on a large scale is subjected, we may well apprehend that the oil is more or less impregnated with the acrid qualities of the envelope, and as we possess remedies, less disgusting and quite as unerring, it would appear but an act of prudence to abjure a remedy in yellow fever whose peculiar in-appropriateness may justly be suspected.
         It has been so long the custom to deride and vilify the character of New Orleans, on the score of climate, health and morals, not only in our own country, but throughout the world, that after some feeble efforts to set ourselves right before our unjust censors, our citizens and writers appear to have given up the struggle, and ceasing to defend us, have settled down into quiet and uncomplaining resignation.
         And yet, except during epidemic seasons, which do not affect our resident citizens, New Orleans may proudly compare in point of health, morals and climate, with the most favored portions of the globe.
         Every evil with which we have to contend with is introduced by strangers.
         Go and survey the seats of impurity, � who are their conductors? who their occupants? who their supporters, and who their frequenters? Strangers; who periodically visit this city.
         Who are the principal agents in distributing deadly alcoholic potations to the inhabitants of
New Orleans, from the infamous and groveling doggery, up to the ornate and gorgeous saloon? and who are their principal frequenters ? Strangers, almost all strangers. Who fill our recorders offices, our watch-houses, and our prisons ? Strangers. How often has it come with - in my knowledge in the course of a long residence in New Orleans, that men who were considered moral, orderly and virtuous, and who were even models of piety and religion at home, having heard so much of the immorality of New Orleans and believing from what they have so often heard un-contradicted, that there is no such thing as law- or propriety in New Orleans, so soon as they arrive here, being removed from the censorship of families and neighbors, have given the reign to all their depraved desires, appetites and passions, and as was to have been expected, the sudden change of habit has been at once productive of disease, too often terminating fatally, thus contributing to swell our bills of mortality, and to add to the opprobrium which common rumor has affixed to our name.
         Thus are we not only chiefly indebted to the "floating population," who come amongst us for the principal portion of our crimes and diseases, but those evils are again employed abroad to depreciate the salubrity of our climate and the morality of our population.
         But let the distant libeller, come and contemplate the actual condition of our resident population whose orderly and virtuous lives may proudly compare with those of any people; let him visit on the Sabbath the temples of the most High, filled to repletion, with devout and orderly congregations, let him investigate the domestic peace and propriety which characterize the lives of our exemplary citizens, and he will there discover locations rarely assailed by disease, and enjoying health fully equal, if not transcending that of any other of the populous and boasted cities of the globe.
         It is high time that the people of New Orleans should repel and repudiate the slanders which have so long been unresistingly heaped upon them, and which have created such foul and false impressions abroad, and fix the charge of vice and insalubrity where it properly belongs � on those who, coming temporarily among us, and stimulated by what they have heard and read concerning us, indulge, while here, in every evil propensity and passion, until they are overtaken by those retributive diseases which have been ordained as the punishment of vice and immorality.
         Let visitors to New Orleans live sober, orderly and virtuous lives while here, and not convert the entire period of their residence among us into one continued saturnalia, and they will enjoy an exemption from disease fully equal to that of the places from whence they came. These are bitter truths, but they are not the less truths, and have no reference to epidemic visitations, when acclimation, so necessary to the protection of the stranger, has to be undergone by the virtuous and the vicious alike; but still the stranger is the sufferer.
         One prominent cause to which may be referred the false aspersions which have been heaped upon the health of New Orleans is the following:
         If five thousand young men, equally selected from all the principal cities of the United States were to come to New Orleans and remain during an epidemic, and one hundred were to die of yellow fever, although being strangers and unknown, no note would or could be taken of them here, except to minister to their necessities and sufferings, and to extend those Influences of sympathy and benevolence, for which the people of New Orleans are so remarkable; yet, in the cities whence they came, extensive circles would be thrown into grief and mourning; their sable habiliments attracting the attention of surrounding friends and neighbors would naturally lead to enquiry and comment, and the ultimate conclusion to which the whole community would arrive would be, that large numbers of their young fellow citizens, in the bloom of youth and hope, had perished untimely in that deadly and pestilential hole. New Orleans; and thus five or six fatal cases, out of several hundred, are frequently so colored distorted and magnified as to affix, in a distant city, and indeed throughout the world, an indelible stigma on the salubrity of New Orleans, for nothing favorable is ever said about the hundreds of survivors, who are forever afterwards exempt from the disease.
         The contemplation of this subject naturally brings to my mind the fact, that within the last few years, but particularly during the late epidemic, strenuous efforts have been made to institute a doubt that acclimation is a perpetual protection from yellow fever forever after; and some physicians, who have witnessed comparatively little of the disease, have not hesitated to declare that they have seen the same person attacked with yellow fever several times, and this new doctrine and its natural corollary have been carried so far that it has been boldly asserted that having been born in New Orleans affords no certain protection from yellow fever. Next to an attempt to demonstrate the contagiousness of yellow fever on doubtful or questionable data, any effort to shake the confidence of the people of New Orleans in the prophylactic security afforded by birth-right and acclimation, I consider the most unpardonable and reckless, not to call it by a harsher name.
         If acclimation has ceased to be a protection from yellow fever, we must not be blamed if we refer the terrible dispensation chiefly to those who have made the melancholy discovery.
         In former years, before the dreadful abuse of quinine became so general, when a patient had passed safely through an attack of yellow fever, (and how many thousands are there now in this city to avouch the fact) it was considered, and was a guarantee of health for many years after.
         Indeed so thorough, searching and beneficial were the results, that persons laboring under previous infirmities, and even hereditary diseases, became from that moment perfectly restored and renovated. Convalescence was rapid, and restoration to health proverbially speedy and perfect; but since the introduction of the appropriately named "abortive treatment," by enormous doses of quinine, conjoined with powerful narcotics, the patients who recover from yellow fever frequently remain miserable valetudinarians, while blindness, deafness and insanity too frequently follow in the dismal train.
         And how can it be expected to be otherwise.
It is impossible that so deadly a disease as yellow fever can suddenly assail an individual without his condition having previously undergone some morbid changes of vast and vital import.
 
         That this is the fact is demonstrated in numberless instances, where persons have left an
infected city who, after many days, have been attacked by the disease.
         If no important changes had been effected in the system before the departure of an individual from a pestilential atmosphere, then his mere escape without being attacked should be a certain and universal protection.
         If, then, the system of an individual has undergone morbid changes long previous to an attack of yellow fever, is it any wonder that the mere cutting off the fever, (the fever itself being merely the means which nature adopts to complain of the ravages which the system has previously undergone,) is it any wonder, I ask, that patients so cured, without any reference to the materies morbi which have led to the attack, merely arresting the consequence, but leaving the morbific causes in full activity, can it be a matter of surprise that convalescence is tedious? that other diseases should supervene, or that the patient should even be attacked again?
         Hence it is, that under the modern or "abortive practice," our watering places in the neighborhood have been crowded with emaciated convalescents from yellow fever, many of whom have cause to lament, in a ruined constitution or impaired faculties and intellects, the
pernicious consequences of the "abortive practice."
         I ask our old citizens, those who in former years went through yellow fever, how long since it has become necessary for convalescents for that disease to leave the city in order to recover their strength and health, and if so great a change has recently occurred is it not fair to presume that it has been the result of some extraordinary and novel imperfection in the treatment of the disease.
         Among the customs of New Orleans, more honorable "in the breach than in the observance," has been the practice, by parents possessing the means, of sending their children to Northern and European cities to be educated.
         This was at a time of life when the system was under going the most important change, viz:
through the period of adolescence.
         Whoever heard of one of these young persons having yellow fever on their return, even when they had been subjected for years to the protracted winters of the North, or the pure and invigorating atmosphere of the Blue, Green or White Mountains ?
 
         Neither their parents nor themselves have ever thought of such a danger; the acclimation afforded by their Southern birth has lingered around them, and they have returned to their native homes with perfect security.
         Let the appalling and pernicious doctrine that there is no security in birth-right and acclimation once be established, and farewell to every benevolent effort to mitigate the sufferings of the afflicted; for what other purpose would they subserve but that of bringing, by every visit of the humane philanthropist to the bedside, new subjects to contract the disease and swell the bills of mortality.
         Note � I understand that an enterprising individual contemplates publishing a list of the persona who died with yellow fever last summer, with the names of the attending physicians annexed. This will furnish as something like a test of the success of the abortive method of treatment.
         Out of the numerous committees who have officiated during the late epidemic in New Orleans, and who have been sent to the various abodes of pestilence, in every direction, by the Howard Association, consisting of physicians, nurses and philanthropic volunteers, how many acclimated persons have died? how many have been attacked with yellow fever? Not one!
         And yet in the face of this most conclusive fact, there are not wanting those who seek to
disseminate the opinion that acclimation is no protection from yellow fever.
         Among all the evils and afflictions to which New Orleans has heretofore been subjected, there has always remained to us one ground of confidence � one source of consolation; and that was, that a person once having yellow fever was forever afterwards secure from a future attack; consequently whenever yellow fever made its appearance in New Orleans, there was always a reliable nucleus about which the sick might rally, and on whom they might confidently depend for aid and assistance during their afflictions; there was, therefore, no commotion, no affright, no " stampede," such as would occur on the appearance of yellow fever in a Northern or European city, and so soon as the disease became manifestly present our acclimated citizens, feeling secure, braced themselves up to minister to the suffering stranger.
 
         And now even this little immunity is sought to be wrested from us, viz: that of doing good without danger to ourselves.
         But let the terrorist succeed in convincing our citizens that neither birth -right nor acclimation afford any protection, and so sure as human nature is weak and fallible, just so sure will sauve que pent" become the watchword on the appearance of an epidemic, and the condition of the sick and suffering will be infinitely aggravated.
         From the days of Sydenham, who first promulgated the doctrine, to the present time, it has been a standing axiom in medicine, that "whenever an epidemic disease prevails in a city, all other diseases resemble it," or, as it was beautifully expressed by Rush," all other diseases wear its livery."
         Such is the case during an epidemic yellow fever � let a man be attacked with almost any
febrile disease when yellow fever prevails, and it is certain to be ushered in or accompanied with some of the general outlines of yellow fever, (which itself, indeed, on its first invasion resembles nothing more than a violent cold, and hence its insidious fatality, so often produced by delay.) Let the acclimated patient treat his attack as he would a common cold, and he is well in a few hours; but call his disease yellow fever, and give him a dose of sixty grains of quinine, and who could be answerable for his safety?
         Again � let a child born in New Orleans be slightly indisposed, and there again you have the same outline of yellow fever symptoms. Administer a terrific dose of quinine, and how can we be surprised should the application of a powerful chemical to the delicate structure of the stomach-produce lesion and loss of life, even with the dreadful symptom, black vomit.
         Birth or residence in New Orleans, including acclimation, do not render children or adults immortal. They are still liable to other febrile diseases, and if they happen to be sick when yellow fever exists epidemically, they have the prominent symptoms of that disease, as they would that of any other epidemic. If they are treated in reference to their indisposition, they generally get well speedily; but if they are maltreated, or treated for a disease with which they are not affected, can we be surprised if their lives are jeopardized, or even destroyed? Assuredly not. The same result from malpractice might justly be expected if no yellow fever were present.
 
         Such are my views of the dangers from yellow fever amongst acclimated adults and children born in New Orleans.
         Among other doctrinal innovations which are latterly gaining ground in New Orleans, growing probably out of the large augmentation of medical gentlemen, highly scientific, no doubt, but who have, in all likelihood, acquired the principal portion of their knowledge of yellow fever from books written probably by those who never witnessed the phenomena of that disease, is the effort to resuscitate the pernicious and long exploded doctrines of contagion and transmission. These obsolete "Gorgons and Chimeras dire"
         Are now sought to be resurrected, in order to inflict upon New Orleans a useless and pernicious
quarantine system, whose only consequences would be the squandering of immense sums of money; the infliction of a deadly injury to commerce, and the dispensation of extensive patronage.
         The doctrines of the contagiousness or transmissibility of yellow fever have been contemplated and discussed in all their phases, by men of the most stupendous abilities, and of all countries, and it is impossible in a brief article of this kind even to name the various authorities who have furnished profound and elaborate productions on the subject.  
         Suffice it to say, that all parties, for a long time past, have appeared to ignore the doctrine
of contagion and transmissibility of yellow fever, and quarantine restrictions have, for good and sufficient reasons, been gradually falling into desuetude and being abandoned.
         It is not to be expected, after the immense labor and talent which have been expended in the investigation and discussion of these questions, in every quarter of the globe, that the unpretending individual who pens this article can throw any new light upon the subject; he can but affix his testimony to what has been so ably and so often fully demonstrated, and say that; born and reared in a Southern seaport periodically visited by yellow fever, and after thirty years' residence in New Orleans, he has never seen the slightest evidence that yellow fever was either contagious or transmissible.
         There are some minds so microscopically constructed that very obscure objects become to them perfectly visible; they can detect hideous monsters and loathsome reptiles in a drop of pure water; if they have to cross oceans, or circumnavigate the globe to seek imaginary objects to engage their admiration or inspire them with horror, they revel in their discovery, and yield themselves up in au ''agony of joy" to the hideous delusion. With them, "'Tis distance lends enchantment to the view."
         But it unfortunately happens that minds thus constituted can rarely be brought to contemplate the palpable, tangible, and cognizable realities immediately around them.
         If, for instance, they bear that a man died on board a ship from Rio Janeiro, or that a pilot saw or heard of a sick man on board of one, or if a man subjected to every exposure happens, while employed on board a ship from a distant port, to fall sick, while hundreds of others are dying all around in other situations, it is enough�their imagination does the rest � the yellow fever was certainly brought from Rio Janeiro.
         But if we remind them of the fact that New Orleans was frequently visited by yellow fever ages before it ever occurred in Rio Janeiro, it is soon discovered that a vessel from Rio Janeiro had touched at some West India port.
         Quarantine was formerly a portion of the burthens of New Orleans, and was abolished because it was found to afford no protection. It has been discovered to be useless during the past summer in Natchez and Galveston, where yellow fever commenced simultaneously with its appearance in Mobile, which latter city was not visited by the disease (notwithstanding constant and uninterrupted intercourse of every description, persons, merchandize steamers and sailing vessels in large numbers passing daily to and fro) until three calendar months, a quarter of a year after its appearance in New Orleans, not more than two hundred miles distant.
         But this is too common-place a demonstration, too plain, too palpable, to satisfy the exalted
abstractions of our new teachers; they require distance, doubt, mystery and romance to engage their attention or convince their understandings.
         With such men it is useless to argue; reasoning cannot enlighten them nor demonstration convince them.
         In the occurrences in New Orleans during the past summer have not taught our citizens that yellow fever is not contagious they would not be convinced if one were to rise from the dead.
 
         We have seen from one to fifty thousand persons enter New Orleans during the past two months when cases of yellow fever were daily occurring, � for they were reported on the 10th of November, � and when none could doubt that every house, hovel, yard, street, lane alley, court, highway and by-way of our city were saturated with the causes of yellow fever, for it had just been ravaging every part of the city, and nothing known to us had occurred to neutralize its virulence.
         Why, then, did not the disease, with this vast accession to our population, recommence with redoubled mortality?
         As late as the 10th of November the public prints announced ten deaths by yellow fever during the preceding week, among a mass of at least forty thousand strangers, in a city where everything was saturated with the exhalations from yellow fever, and no epidemic ensued,'
         Mortuary statistics in a brief paper like this would be of little use, except they pointed to some ulterior benefit; but it may be of some importance in contemplating the probable utility of quarantine laws to glance at the past occurrences of yellow fever in New Orleans.
         In the Southern Medical Reports, page 123 in the statistics of yellow fever, collated by Dr. Simonds, it will be perceived that epidemic yellow fever prevailed in New Orleans during the following years viz: in 1821, 1822, 1832, 33, 34, 35, mild;'37, violent; 39, violent; '41, violent; '42, '43, '44, mild, and 47 violent. From l847 there has been no epidemic until the late fatal visitation of 1854.
         Let it be borne in mind, prominently by our authorities, that, according to the above records, the correctness of which is beyond the shadow of a doubt, no epidemic yellow fever occurred in New Orleans from the abolition of the former quarantine establishment in the winters of 1824 and '25 to 1S32, making a period of 7 years, but that sporadic cases, sometimes amounting to hundreds, have occurred almost annually.
         If yellow fever can be affected by quarantine laws, and in consequence of their absence it has entered our city almost every year, why has it not become epidemic every year? If it be contagious, why has if not spread throughout the city every year?
         But an unfortunate ship, which has crossed two oceans, and been almost a quarter of a year making her voyage, with a crew in perfect health, must be charged with introducing yellow fever into New Orleans, because the friends of Quarantine and believers in contagion and transmission have surrounded her with doubt, mystery and apprehension, while we have forty thousand living evidences among us that yellow fever is not contagious, and that unventilated hovels, saturated with the consequences of recent disease and death, with every favorable atmospheric peculiarity, cannot create an epidemic.
         If yellow fever were contagious or transmissible by shipping, then quarantine establishments would be charnel-houses; the arresting and detaining people in health at such places would be legalized murder. Every attendant would be swept away, and their places constantly replenished by other victims, to share the same fate. The whole process would be a vivid example of "binding the living to the dead."
         But what are the real facts of the case? A ship arrives at Quarantine with yellow fever on board, or cholera, if you please. The sick and well are taken on shore; the sick die or recover, and the well, who have been formerly mingling with the sick on board the vessel, in the very focus of contagion, after being retained for a specified time in pretty close contiguity with the dead and dying, with perfect impunity, are permitted to proceed on their way, while physicians, nurses and attendants, utterly unscathed, pocket their fees, and quietly smile at the whole proceeding.
         This is the history of Quarantine, and those its useless consequences.
         There was some show of reason in the course pursued at some quarantine establishment of which I have read during the past summer, where they kept an armed force, who threatened to fire on any vessel which should attempt to land. The people at the quarantine ground had no idea, if the yellow fever were really contagious, of being made martyrs of; they thought it as well to keep it even from the quarantine ground.
         If yellow fever were contagious, or if it originated from or were propagated by filth, offal,
or vegetable decomposition, or alluvial deposit, then would epidemics occur annually in New Orleans, for the latter causes have always existed; and statistical records from sources which defy doubt or suspicion, viz: the Charity Hospital, show that occasional cases, sometimes amounting to hundreds, occur almost every year in New Orleans, without propagating the disease among our population. Why, then, should two, three, or a dozen cases in or from a ship do it?
 
         But I must hasten to a conclusion. From all I have heretofore said, it can be readily understood that the following are my opinions:
 
1. That yellow fever is not contagious.
 
2. That it is not produced by filth, offal, vegetable decomposition, or an alluvial soil, because it has occurred in the most clean and pure situations, and in cities based upon sand and granite.
 
3. That it is distinct from, and unlike every other fever.
 
4. That quarantine regulations will have no effect in preventing its visitations.
 
5. That efforts by subterranean drainage, and other projects looking to the removal of animal and vegetable decomposition, will have no influence in arresting or preventing it.
 
6. That it will eventually, in Kew Orleans, wear itself out and disappear, even with an increase of the causes to which it has been heretofore referred, as it has done under similar circumstances in so many other cities.
 
         Amid the darkness and gloom which have from time to time overspread our city, we have, therefore, still the star of hope beaming out, and we should not yield to despair, or even permit the past to intimidate or discourage us.
         Other cities have been subjected to desolating epidemics � they have survived those visitations, and have become healthy, populous and mighty metropolises.
         Our city has progressed in extent and population, and with a rapidity far exceeding the anticipations of the ancient inhabitants.
         Increasing commerce, accumulating wealth, and projected improvements, bid fair at no very remote period to render New Orleans one of the mightiest of cities, if not the emporium of the world.
         We have, then, nothing to deter our citizens from exertion, but every thing to encourage us, if the authorities of New Orleans and the State attempt nothing rash, doubtful or oppressive, but pursue a steady and rational system of gradual improvements, so as to enable our local condition to keep pace with our high destinies.
 
To the Medical profession I would beg leave to say:
Although often foiled in our recent encounters with the deadly foe, let us not despair. Antaeus-like, when cast down, let us arise and renew the struggle, let us redouble our diligence, and multiply our devoted exertions for the health and happiness of our race, and perchance some remedy may yet be devised or discovered to enable mankind to defy the deadly and insidious destroyer, yellow fever, and to realize the beautiful prediction of the poet � " What dire necessities on every hand Our aid, our strength, our fortitude require; Of foes intestine what a numerous band,
Against this little throb of life conspire; But reason shall elude their ire; Ere long, and turn aside death's leveled dart, Soothe the sharp pain, allay the fever's fire, And yet bestow soft nights, and balmy days impart."

SUBMITTED BY CAROLYN CARTER