1 LITERARY ROOMS, No. 121 CHESNUT STREET, Office of the Journal of Health, Family Library of Health, &c. 1831. Entered according to the Act of Congress, in the year one thousand eight hundred and thirty-one, by Henry H. Porter, in the Clerk's Office of the District Court of the United States, in and for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania. Librarian Langley 9-22-257 12335 THE JOURNAL OF HEALTH. CONDUCTED BY AN ASSOCIATION OF PHYSICIANS. NO. 1. Health-the poor man's riches, the rich man's bliss. PHILADELPHIA, SEPTEMBER 8, 1830. VOL. II. THE great annual mortality from fevers in most regions of the earth, the various and alarming features which they so often assume, the sufferings of the sick, and intense anxiety of friends in attendance, to say nothing of the protracted disorders which not unfrequently become the portion of the survivors, are circumstances well calculated to invite attention to the causes and prevention of such formidable maladies. As if destined to check the exuberant pride, in which we should be so prone to indulge, at the advantages of our own favoured land, the visitation of febrile diseascs often presses heavily upon many portions of it. Were we, indeed, to credit the accounts, and be swayed by the fears and prejudices of the writers, and no small portion of the inhabitants of Europe, we should be tempted to regard ourselves as peculiarly exposed to this evil. But a slight examination of the subject must soon satisfy any observant inquirer, that such a belief is not borne out by facts. An Englishman forgets that within trumpet's call of London, are to be found localities for remittent fevers, of a high grade; while in the fens of Lincoln and Cambridgeshire, and districts of Hampshire, he may find the counterparts of the eastern shore of Maryland and the neck of Virginia, for agues and their sequela. Provence, so celebrated for the balmy purity of its air, has also, as the well-informed Frenchman knows, its low grounds and marshes, where diseases, characterized by all the violence of our own bilious fevers, are of common, if not of annual occurrence; and in Britanny the same topography is attended with the same inflictions. Travellers love to descant, and we love to join them in the theme, on the bright cerulean sky of Italy; but let us not forget that the fertile plains of the Po and the Adige, so productivé of VOL. II.-1 3 |