Meteorological Observations of the Weather, in the City of New-York, from May to September, inclusive, 1820.

An Account of the Endemic Yellow Fever, as it occurred in the City of New-York, during the Summer and Autumn of 1819. By CHARLES DRAKE, M. D. Physician to the Bellevue Establishment.

THE public are already furnished with two able and circumstantial relations of this endemic by Drs. Pascalis and Watts.* The design of their labours was to ascertain its origin, and the laws which regulate its propagation; without attempting to describe the disease, assign its type, or point out in what it differed from our autumnal endemics of former years. That they did not attempt to accomplish more, is probably to be ascribed to the fact that neither of those gentlemen attended a sufficient number of cases, to enable them to detail the general concourse of symptoms with that degree of minuteness, which is desirable in such cases. Indeed, the same remark will apply to most of the physicians of the city, none of whom attended more than four or five cases, and very few even that number. As physician of the Bellevue Establishment, the charge of the hospital opened for the reception of these

* See A Statement of the occurrences during a malignant yellow fever in the city of New-York, in the summer and autumnal months of 1819. By Felix Pascalis, M. D. and Part 2 of Vol. I. Hospital Register, by Drs. Watts, Mott, and Stevens.

fevers at Fort Stevens, near Hellgate, gave me a more ample opportunity of observing the disease, and noting its symptoms, than fell to the lot of any other practitioner; but at the same time I must confess, it was not so extensive as, under other circumstances, would be required of one who attempts to write its history; which I had not undertaken but from the failure of others, and a persuasion that the deductions I have made, from the observation of sixteen cases, will be found to apply with sufficient correctness to the fever as it prevailed generally.

The yellow fever had not made its appearance in the city of New-York since the year 1805. Nevertheless, the constituted authorities had not remitted the rigour of quarantine regulations, to guard against danger from abroad, nor relaxed the execution of those wholesome police arrangements which are calculated to obviate all sources of insalubrity at home. This long respite from an epidemic calamity began to be viewed by many as a pledge of total exemption; and measures, once deemed salutary, and submitted to with cheerfulness, were now felt to be prejudicial to commerce, and burdensome to the city. Fortunately for the cause of medical investigation, as well as humanity, these feelings had not been suffered to influence those who were charged with the execution of the health laws; for, on the appearance of fever in the latter part of August and first days of September, such had been the rigid execution of the quarantine system, that the Board of Health were led, as if by intuitive discernment, to the cause and origin of the disease, and the consequent adoption of measures, which, while they were successful in an unparalleled degree in securing the city from the ravages of pestilence, have presented in a clear, insulated, and conclusive. manner, the causes which engender and propagate our autumnal endemics.

The weather, for several weeks preceding the appearance of this endemic, was remarkable for its unusual and continued heat, the prevalence of southerly winds, and

great drought. The same state of the air, and the same deficiency of rain, were felt, in a greater or less degree, throughout the Atlantic coast of the country, and appear to have had a very sensible influence on the diseases of the season for besides the appearance of yellow fever in the cities of New-York, Philadelphia, Boston, Baltimore, Charleston, Savannah, and New-Orleans, the villages and many parts of the country, especially in the southern states, suffered considerably from obstinate remitting and intermitting fevers, dysenteries, &c.

In the month of August, the thermometer in the city of New-York was never at noon below 80° Farh. and during several days of that month it rai.ged beyond 90°. The atmosphere at the same time was uncommonly calm, and little rain had fallen for several weeks, so that vegetavery tion in the surrounding country, and as far north as the Highlands, was seriously Dajured; the crops of all kinds were light, in many places they totally failed, and trees, even in the lowest forests, perished from the extreme drought. Such was the scarcity of culinary vegetables, that the city was supplied from distant districts of the country, and even from Albany ;* a circumstance that had never before occurred.

The epidemics of 1798 and 1805 commenced at Old Slip, and the prevalence of 1819 was almost exclusively confined to a small district adjoining this commercial nuisance. Every case officially acknowledged to have been yellow fever, was satisfactorily traced to this spot, except two, and some doubts respecting these induced many to believe that these persons also received the disease by visiting the infected district. What are the circumstances, of this locality, it may be asked, to originate these pestilential fevers? Is it that this slip is appropriated to the use of vessels arriving from West-India ports, and other places within the tropics, where yellow fever prevails?

* Distant from New-York 150 miles.

So far from it, that it is almost exclusively occupied by coasters, a very small number of which come from ports south of Baltimore; and we must look to the actual condition of the slip and its vicinage for an explication of their rise and progress. This slip is very shallow, and one of the longest and most land-locked of any within the limits of the city, situated in the lowest and oldest part of the town, and further rendered liable to the accumulation of filth from an extensive sewer which empties at the head of it. Its filthy condition, and that of its immediate neighbourhood, at the time, was such as to attract the notice of the Grand Jury, who represented it as containing much putrescent matter, exposed on the recession of tide water to the influence of a hot sun, giving occasion to the emission of noxious and offensive effluvia. The houses on the west side of the slip, where a great part of the victims of the fever resided, are for the most part old wooden buildings in a decayed state, without yards, ill ventilated, and crowded with inhabitants. The offensive condition of the slip and sewer, during the hot days of the latter part of August, was also remarked by many citizens whose business led them to that part of the city. A respectable practitioner informed me, that about this time he was employed in an obstetric case, in the house occupied by Mrs. Kavenaugh, where herself and four others sickened with yellow fever, and that the house was much crowded, almost every room being occupied by a family, very filthy and confined. The room in which he was engaged was so offensive, that he was induced to throw open the window; but the wind blowing in a direction from the slip, he was assailed by such a blast of putrid effluvia, that he was constrained to close the window, and patiently endure the unpleasant smell within.

The best possible proof, that the fever originated from local causes, existing in and about this slip, the sewer, and the foul condition of many of the dwellings of the district, will be found by tracing the disease through its whole