Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 14.djvu/159

Rh The antidotal resources of Nature counteract the evil for a while diarrhœa, retching, and intermittent fevers, discover her efforts to secrete an indigestible substance; the suicidal diet is modified, in quantity at least, by nausea and loss of appetite, and the periodical north winds that reduce the summer temperature of our Southern States by twenty or thirty degrees may help to postpone the crisis for weeks and months. But if that palliative fails, and the devotee of established customs pursues his course with intrepid fanaticism, the barriers of life yield at last, and Nature ends an evil which she cannot cure. The direct cause of yellow fever is the inability of the vital power to withstand the double influence of moist heat from within and without.

In all zymotic diseases the blood passes through the incipient stages of fermentation, incited, perhaps, by floating animal or vegetable germs but favored by and depending upon the enteric condition of each individual. The morbid humors begin to ferment, the progress of decomposition separates the red blood-globules from the serum; the first accumulate in the digestive apparatus and are discharged in that vomit of cruor which marks the advanced stages of yellow fever and cholera, while the absence of the coloring particles from the circulating blood tinges the skin with a yellowish hue. The convulsion of the bowels reacts on the brain, produces violent headaches, coma, perhaps, or delirium, and paroxysms of nausea, and ends by utter exhaustion and death. It is notorious that the bodies of the victims of yellow fever need immediate interment on account of the swiftness with which putrefaction begins, or rather ends, its work.

As its name implies, a fever epidemic is a contagious disease, and it cannot be denied that by prompt removal from the infected atmosphere innumerable candidates of the winding-sheet might be saved; but it is quite as certain that even persons of a frail constitution, but innocent of dietetic sins, may breathe with impunity the air in which thousands of their stricken fellow-citizens have recently expired. Everywhere the mortality lists show a great preponderance of males over females, of men of sedentary pursuits over open-air laborers, and of epicures over ascetics. Catholic seminarists, Sisters of Charity, vegetarians, and tramps, have enjoyed a remarkable immunity, owing to their voluntary or involuntary habits of abstinence. Worried physicians, spectral old spinsters, and smoke-dried presbyters, have generally survived, while corpulent beer-brewers, lusty landlords, and chubby butcher-boys, went down like grass under a sweeping scythe; and the local papers of New Orleans and Vicksburg have repeatedly called attention to the fact that the business-men who declined to close either their earthly career or their stores were mostly Italians and Jews.

The lessons of the last epidemic find numerous precedents in the