Report on the yellow fever of 1867 : made by request to the American Institute of Homoeopathy / by William H. Holcombe.

  • Holcombe, William H. (William Henry), 1825-1893.
Date:
1869
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Report on the yellow fever of 1867 : made by request to the American Institute of Homoeopathy / by William H. Holcombe. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by the National Library of Medicine (U.S.), through the Medical Heritage Library. The original may be consulted at the National Library of Medicine (U.S.)

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    middle of August. Early in August the occurrence of profuse haemorrhage from the kidneys in a case of bilious remittent pre- pared me to expect the advent of that formidable disease, in which haemorrhage and jaundice are so frequently concurrent. The striking peculiarities of the epidemic of 1867 were the following: — The number of cases was enormous, greater in proportion to population than was ever seen before; The general virulence and consequent mortality were far less than in any previous epidemic. The cases were variously esti- mated from 40,000 to 60,000. The burials were about 3,100, exclusive of U. S. troops, among whom the mortality was far higher than among the citizens; A great many deaths occurred amongst the native Creole population of French descent, — a most unusual thing, but now firmly established by the statistics of Dr. Delery, himself a Creole; The disease was extraordinarily severe among children, many of them dying with black vomit. This distressing peculiarity was universally remarked; It was milder with negroes than in 1853 and 1855; The type of the disease was rather nervous, rheumatic, or neuralgic, than bilious. I mean that it leaned to the form of the break-bone fever, or dengue, rather than to that of the bilious fevers of malignant character, which the yellow fevers of 1853, '55 and '58 more closely resembled. This was no doubt the reason why the fever was so very widely diffused, and so much more manageable than in the epidemics above mentioned; It was both preceded and followed by many cases of cholera and dysentery; The proofs of its direct importation and contagiousness were less striking and satisfactory than they had been in some previous epidemics; The number of second attacks was unusually great. The re-