Observations on the means of improving the medical police of the City of New-York : delivered as an introductory discourse, in the hall of the College of Physicians and Surgeons, on the sixth of November, 1820.

  • Hosack, David, 1769-1835.
Date:
[1820?]
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Observations on the means of improving the medical police of the City of New-York : delivered as an introductory discourse, in the hall of the College of Physicians and Surgeons, on the sixth of November, 1820. 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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    will wish that the publications to which they have affixed their names, had never seen the light. Indeed, as it regards their knowledge of yellow fever, I feel constrained to remark, that it would almost appear that one of the great qualifications of those gentlemen is to be practically unacquaint- ed with the disease on which they write: and, as in viewing certain objects, it is necessary for the observer, for the purpose of more distinct vision, to withdraw to a considerable distance from the object to be inspected, they, in like manner, have considered it equally proper to take a distant view of the epidemic they are to describe. Such I allege has been the fact, that the greater number of those who have written most, and in the most dogmatic style, not only in the earlier years, when yellow fever visited our shores, but in the later seasons of its appearance, have immediately upon the commencement of the disease, fled to a distance from the scene of distress: but what they want in facts they supply by bold assertion, and for dis- passionate reasoning they substitute the coarsest personalities. This observation is not exclusively confined to the late writers who have appeared in the United States; it is no less applicable, in all its extent, to the intemperate effusions of a transatlantic author of some notoriety—I refer to the pages 6f Dr. Edward Nathaniel Bancroft.* That physiciar, it appears, has still to learn the elementary truths * See his Essav on Yellow Fever-