Report on the malignant disease, which prevailed in the city of New-York in the autumn of 1805 : addressed to the Governor of the State of New-York / by Edward Miller, M. D., resident physician for the city of New-York.

  • Miller, Edward, 1760-1812.
Date:
[1806]
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Report on the malignant disease, which prevailed in the city of New-York in the autumn of 1805 : addressed to the Governor of the State of New-York / by Edward Miller, M. D., resident physician for the city of New-York. 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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    Lloyd in town, and of Dr. Ord on this coast ; and I have no hesitation in pronouncing it a fever of infection. Its features are, almost without exception, precisely those of the malignant pestilential fever of Grenada of 1793 and 1794. It is fully as fatal, as rapid, and as insidious. Its origin, as far as it has been ascertained by the gentlemen I have mentioned, seems to be similar. A ship arrived about the beginning of July or end of June from Liver- pool, after touching at Surinam. The filth on board, occasioned by a cargo of horses, and the extreme neglect of the officers and crew, was such as beggars descrip- tion. See Medical Repository, vol 5, page 229. Thefe facts, thus presented by Dr. Chisholm himself, form a luminous and instructive commentary on his for- mer opinion, which he had published with great confi- dence, and which has been implicitly adopted and acted on by the contagionists in the United States. In 1793, he pronounced the malignant disease of Grenada, which, as was observed before, he believed to have been import- ed from the coast of Africa, a nova pcstis^ a pe- culiar, original, foreign pestilence, recently generated and utterly unknown before, endued with a new and dis- tinct character, possessing new powers of devastation, and capable of propagating itself by contagion throughout the world. As he considered it to have been engendered on board of the Hankey, in consequence of the ^cu- mulation of filth, 'the crowding of a great number of per- sons within a small space, and the heat of the atmosphere in which the vessel was immersed; he must have ascribed whatever peculiarity he supposed it to possess, to the peculiar state of the air on the coast of Africa ; for he did not pretend to derive it originally from the inhabitants of Africa, or any modification of contagion. No other cir- cumstance of the case, therefore, except some unknown singularity of the African atmosphere, could occasion tins