A Treatise on the Eclectic Southern Practice of Medicine Page: 160 of 724

                                
YELLOW FEVER.

wisdom of centuries have not'yet set aside. It seems to
us, in the nineteenth century, that it is time for science
to obliterate, even from the pages of the past, a demon
that has even shackled commerce. And yet there are
not wanting individuals of distinction, who still endeavor
to maintain their truth and perpetuate their influence.
And I will here remark, so far as my knowledge
extends, that every candid and well conducted enquiry
into the hypothesis of contagion has resulted unfavora-
bly to it. Dr. Rush was candid and honest enough to
recede from his first position; and it is admitted by high
medical authorities, that among the former advocates of
contagion in the West Indies, scarcely one can be found
in the present day.
Dr. Bono, who resided in the West Indies for a num-
ber of years, and whose opinions on yellow fever are
entitled to great confidence, says: "I_ have proved in
the Naval Hospital that the yellow fever cannot, by
any possibility, be communicated from one, person to
another."
"We do not allow the fever commonly called yellow
fever to be infectious." This opinion is supported by
many American authors; yet I am not prepared to say,
if a great number of persons laboring under yellow fever
in its violent form, and crowded into an ill ventilated
apartment, as on board ship, might not create a morbid
atmosphere, and if conveyed to a place extremely filthy,
the probability is. that it might find an affinity in the
atmosphere of that locality, and might act as a spark to
ignite the whole material; but we should most rigidly
observe, generally, that the great error is in attributing
to contagion, that which should honestly be attributed

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