Facts appear to have established, that it is
originated here by a local atmosphere, which is never generated but
in the lower, closer, and dirtier parts of our large cities, in the
neighborhood of the water; and that, to catch the disease, you must
enter the local atmosphere. Persons having taken the disease in the
infected quarter, and going into the country, are nursed and buried by
their friends, without an example of communicating it. A vessel going
from the infected quarter, and carrying its atmosphere in its hold into
another State, has given the disease to every person who there entered
her. These have died in the arms of their families, without a single
communication of the disease. It is certainly, therefore, an epidemic,
not a contagious disease; and calls on the chemists for some mode
of purifying the vessel by a decomposition of its atmosphere, if
ventilation be found insufficient. In the long scale of bilious fevers,
graduated by many shades, this is probably the last and most mortal
term. It seizes the native of the place equally with strangers. It has
not been long known in any part of the United States. The shade
next above it, called the stranger's fever, has been coeval with the
settlement of the larger cities in the southern parts, to wit, Norfolk,
Charleston, New Orleans. Strangers going to these places in the months
of July, August, or September, find this fever as mortal as the genuine
yellow fever.
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