Observations on the changes of the air, and the concomitant epidemical diseases in the island of Barbadoes : to which is added, A treatise on the putrid bilious fever, commonly called the yellow fever, and such other diseases as are indigenous or endemial in the West India islands, or in the torrid zone / by William Hillary, M.D. with notes by Benjamin Rush, M.D.

  • Hillary, William, -1763.
Date:
1811
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Observations on the changes of the air, and the concomitant epidemical diseases in the island of Barbadoes : to which is added, A treatise on the putrid bilious fever, commonly called the yellow fever, and such other diseases as are indigenous or endemial in the West India islands, or in the torrid zone / by William Hillary, M.D. with notes by Benjamin Rush, M.D. 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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    PREFACE. THE following observations on the changes of the air, and variations of the weather, were made in the island of Barbadoes, with care and exactness, and are truly related. The degrees of the heat or the coolness of the air were observed by Fahrenheit's mercurial thermometer, made at Amsterdam, every morning at or before the rising of the sun, and again between the hours of twelve and one o'clock at noon. And the height of the mercury in the barometer was observed at the same times, though I have only recorded its station at noon; and I should have be- gun these observations some years sooner, if an accident had not deprived me of my barometer; but if I had known that the variations in it had been so very little, within the torrid zone, as I found them afterwards, I should have made them without it; as the greatest variation in it, in six years time, was never more than four tenths of an inch, viz. from twenty-nine six tenths of an inch high to thirty inches. I also made use of a hygrometer to ob- serve the degrees of moisture and dryness of the air, but found its variations to be so immaterial, except when the rains fell, and were visible to our senses, as not to be worth recording; especially as the quantity of rain which