A brief description of the yellow fever : as it prevailed at Mt. Pleasant and in Charleston Harbor during the summer of 1857 / by R.A. Kinloch.

  • Kinloch, R. A. (Robert Alexander), 1826-1891.
Date:
1858
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: A brief description of the yellow fever : as it prevailed at Mt. Pleasant and in Charleston Harbor during the summer of 1857 / by R.A. Kinloch. 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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    ence to the fever as it prevailed in the summer of 185G, at points upon the Long Island and Staten Island shores. An immense number of infected vessels, seventy-nine in all, lying, during the season, at quarantine station, and in the Narrows, of New York harbor, furnished such an abun- dance of the morbific agent of yellow fever for the winds to act upon, that the poison became sufficiently concentrated upon portions of the shore line to develope many cases of yellow fever. The winds were the efficient transporting agents; the infected vessels the sources from which the noxious agent came. This occurrence was new in the harbor of New York. I cannot understand why it was manifested for the first time in the summer of 1850, except from the fact that the number of infected vessels collected at quarantine was much larger than during previous seasons. The more numerous the vessels, the closer would many of them approximate the shore, the more abundant would be the morbific material—the germs, if this expression is better liked—capable of producing disease; the more abundant the germs to be diffused and transmitted by the wind, the more likelihood of the dose necessary for pro- ducing disease reaching the shore. It will not do to say that extraordinary conditions existing upon the shore created an unusual atmosphere, which served as a nidus in which a few germs became self-multiplying; for it is proverbial that the yellow fever poison—the living germ—brought from the lo- cality in which it is generated, will produce disease in a proper subject in any atmosphere. An infected vessel from a yellow fever port, lying at a wharf on the Long Island, or the Staten Island shores, will communicate disease any summer to per- sons who may come in close proximity to her. Such disease may not extend further than to those directly exposed; but this is altogether another matter. The important element, then, I take it, in originating so much disease in the New York harbor, was the large number of infected vessels at quar- antine. In reference to our Mount Pleasant fever, we must examine the likelihood of atmospheric transmission from the quaran- tine ground, and from the vessels that took position on the