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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    cannot be without interest. Under this impres- sion, I invite your attention to some general re- marks on febrile coniagion, and shall conclude by pointing out the means calculated to promote the health of the city; and which, in conjunction with the excellent quarantine regulations of this state, may secure us from future visitations of yellow fever, and other contagious diseases, usually propa- gated through the medium of an impure atmos- phere. You are doubtless aware of the opposite opinions which have divided the physicians of the United States relative to the contagious nature of yellow fever, and of the controversies to which that ques- tion has given birth, relative to the domestic origin or foreign source of that disease. The same di- versity of opinion, though in a less degree, exists among the physicians of the West Indies, and of Europe; and, latterly, in this country, the same question has been agitated relative to the con- tagiousness of dysentery, the various forms of typhus, jail, ship, or hospital fever, and has been extended even to the plague itself: each too con- tends that his opinion is legitimately deduced from facts. Paradoxical as it may seem, this is truly the case; they are both right, and each reasons correctly from the premises he assumes : for exam- ple, he who contends that the yellow fever is con- tagious, under all circumstances, in the pure air of the country, as well as in the foul air of the city, certainly contradicts the facts which repeated ob- servations have established. On the other hand,