Outlines of a plan, calculated to put a stop to the progress of the malignant contagion, which rages on the shores of the Mediterranean, ... / by Richard Pearson.

Date:
1804
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Outlines of a plan, calculated to put a stop to the progress of the malignant contagion, which rages on the shores of the Mediterranean, ... / by Richard Pearson. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh. The original may be consulted at the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh.

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    season most favourable for its action ; but was at length totally destroyed, together * with the houses themselves, at the time of that memorable conflagration. Hodges however, positively asserts that the contagion of 1665 was derived from Holland, where it raged the preceding year, and into which country it had been introduced in some cotton goods brought from the Levant.* * Because Cadiz, Malaga and Gibraltar, have re- cently been depopulated by a pestilential disorder, it is not therefore to be inferred that the houses and streets of those places are worse constructed now, or abound more in filth than they did 20 or 30 years ago; or that in their diet and mode of living, the inhabitants have undergone any material changes. Now, if this be admitted, it must follow that the contagion was im- ported and not generated there; otherwise the same causes, (viz. closeness and filth) having existed before those periods of time in an equal degree, the plague or yellow fever, (to whichsoever of these two forms of disease the epidemic belongs,) should likewise have then prevailed. But while I contend that, the plague is not produced by the same causes which give rise to typhus, or the common infectious fever of this cli- mate, but that it is a sui generis contagion, as much c