Page:Transactions of the Provincial Medical and Surgical Association, volume 4.djvu/265

 Rh communications of the local practitioners, to state, that a degree of prevalence, like in kind, but varying in intensity from time to time, has marked the district for many years past, and nearly in every part of it alike. The testimony of the four oldest practitioners, the duration of whose practice, at the period of my inquiries (in 1819-20), had been thirty-six, forty-eight, forty-nine, and fifty years, respectively, was uniform in this particular, although their accounts varied as to the relative degree of prevalence in more recent and distant years. One of these gentlemen, who resided in Penzance, regarded the disease as less common of late years; while another, resident in the town of Helstone, fourteen miles to the eastward, considered the amount of fever to have been greater during the latter twenty years, than the twenty preceding. The longest period of exemption of the district from this fever, in the epidemic form, admitted by any of them, was ten years; but the general testimony went in favour of an exemption of only one or two years. The disease was considered to have retained the same general character throughout the whole period of my informants experience; but it was admitted by some, to have been more fatal in former years. The existence of this fever, as an almost habitual condition of the district, is also shewn by the register of deaths in the parishes of St. Paul and St. Hilary. In the former parish, which comprehends the large fishing villages of Newlyn and Mousal, there is only one single year (1801), between 1795 and 1814, in which a death from fever is not recorded; while the proportion of deaths, from this cause, was rather