diphtheria, and it was at the same time prevalent in other parts of New England.

Barber gives the following account of an epidemic in the same year in the town of Somers. "In the year 1775 a malignant fever prevailed in town. It began about the first of August and raged three months. This sickness had been immediately preceded by the scarlet fever and dysentery, which carried off a number. 36 persons died that year, most of whom died of the fever, about one in 29 of the whole number of inhabitants in the town. It seized its patients with great violence, and frequently brought life to a close by the eighth day and sometimes as early as the sixth. It rarely failed of attacking every person in the house where it entered in its early stages. The people in general were filled with great consternation. Nurses were procured with great difficulty, and in some instances the sick must have suffered, if recourse had not been had to legal coertion." "The scenes of distress which opened among the sick and dying can be remembered by us who were eye witnesses, but cannot be described." The absence of any description leaves one entirely in the dark with respect to the diagnosis of this disease.

Influenza was generally prevalent again in the spring of 1781. Dr. Cotton Tufts of Weymouth, Mass., previously mentioned, makes the following interesting observation with reference to this epidemic, according to Webster: "The disorder was seldom fatal, but its effects were visible in the multiplied cases of pulmonary consumption in the following year."

Webster states that measles prevailed throughout New England in 1783 but I have seen no specific mention of Connecticut. In the same year scarlet fever was severe in Middletown, and this seems to have inaugurated a wave of scarlet fever which spread itself more or less all over the eastern part of the country, and which lasted five or six years.

In 1789-90 influenza was rife again in New England, coming apparently from New York and reaching Hartford about the middle of October, 1789. Webster himself had an attack of it at that time. It was epidemic again in the spring of 1790.

After an interval of two or three years scarlet fever reap

peared in 1792 and in a malignant form, complicated many times. apparently with the laryngeal or other form of diphtheria. The same year in Bethlem there were five deaths from cynanche trachealis. That town seems to have been a particularly shining mark, for we read in Webster: "In February 1793 the scarlet fever invaded the town of Bethlem like an armed man," in the form called "angina maligna." Nineteen children died of it that year and fourteen the next. This wave of scarlet fever seemed to begin in some of the inland towns. Litchfield, New Fairfield, and Hartford are particularly mentioned, but in September and October, 1793, it began to appear in the shore towns, and rapidly spreading by the early part of 1794 it was very general. On the authority of Dr. Monson, Jr., of New Haven, who left an excellent account of this epidemic, having been preceded by influenza in the fall of 1793 it became very severe early in 1794, and during the first half of that year it seized more than 750 persons in New Haven, mostly youth, of whom fiftytwo died. Dr. Monson speaks of the ulcerous sore throat as "highly putrid."

In the fall of 1793 Webster states that a fatal dysentery "prevailed in Coventry in Connecticut and killed almost every person whom it seized." Also, "that a nervous or long fever prevailed in Wethersfield," meaning by that term, I suppose, what we now call typhoid fever.

The year 1794 is particularly noteworthy as marking the appearance of yellow fever in New Haven. The first case occurred June 10, in the person of a woman living on Long Wharf. The nature of her illness was not determined until just before her death. Other cases rapidly followed but the outbreak was confined for the most part to the vicinity of Long Wharf. In all, there were about 160 cases and sixty-four deaths, of which forty-eight had black vomit. The disease raged from June to November, being worst in September at which time the town was healthy otherwise. It proved equally mortal in every part of the town where it occurred. There followed, as has happened so many times in the case of yellow fever, a hot discussion as to whether the disease was imported or native. The prominent physicians of the town, I believe, favored the first

view. Dr. Monson writes, "No person had the yellow fever unless in consequence of attending the sick or being exposed by nurses, infected houses, clothing, or furniture." "It is certain from facts before mentioned that yellow fever is propagated in no other way than by contagion, and this is a specific contagion; and no more diversified in its operation on the human system than that of smallpox or measles." Webster, in his account argues as usual at length in favor of his theory that all such outbreaks are due primarily to a pestilential state of the atmosphere, assumed to be connected in some way with the celestial bodies, or with various weather conditions coöperating oftentimes with insanitary local conditions.

This epidemic in New Haven, and the one in New London to be described later, furnish so far as known the only instances where undoubted yellow fever gained a serious foothold in the

state.

Dr. Monson refers to an account given him by "aged persons" of an interesting occurrence in New Haven in June, 1743. "A transient person who came from the West Indies lodged at the house of Nath. Brown an inn keeper in this city. The man was taken very sick in the night; and died shortly afterward; and his body was very yellow after death. Mr. Brown's wife sickened in a short time and died of the same complaint; which was at that time supposed to be yellow fever." In that same year it is recalled the so-called "bilious plague" raged in New York.

With our present knowledge of the mode of transmission of yellow fever the seemingly unaccountable facts find ready explanation. A few days before the first case, a sloop from Martinico arrived and tied up at the wharf only a few rods from the home of the first patient. This vessel came from an infected. port, and in view of what followed we can safely assume was well supplied with infected Stegomia mosquitoes. The interval between the arrival of the sloop and the appearance of the first case agrees with the known period of incubation of the disease as established by that epoch-making experimental research of the United States Army Yellow Fever Commission in Cuba.

On August 20, 1795, according to Dr. Monson, Capt. John

Smith died in New Haven of yellow fever, having caught the disease in New York. He communicated it to one of his negro servants.

For several years following 1794 cases of malignant fever were reported in a number of places in Connecticut. Webster generally calls them "bilious plague." Some were probably yellow fever, but with the data at hand now it is quite impossible to give a positive opinion. Connecticut practitioners of those days had had for the most part little or no experience with yellow fever, and it is not surprising that they were many times in doubt. Even to-day the diagnosis of yellow fever is said not to be entirely easy; in fact, having in mind other forms of acute infectious hemorrhagic jaundice, it is probably fully as difficult as it was in 1795. In 1795 there were a few cases at Mill River near Fairfield, said to have come from "infected persons from New York," where it was severely epidemic in that year. Again in 1797 there was, according to Webster, a malignant fever in Chatham, Conn., and cases also at Hartford both that summer and the two following. Whether these were yellow fever or perhaps some form of malarial fever it is impossible now to say.

According to Webster: "In the following year (1795) a malignant dysentery originated and prevailed in New Haven, destroying more lives than the bilious plague of 1794." He states also that, "in 1796 the measles which was epidemic in New York in 1795 was epidemic in Connecticut."

New London in 1798 was stricken with undoubted yellow fever in epidemic form. We have what is probably a fairly accurate contemporary account of this outbreak issued in pamphlet form by Charles Holt, publisher of The Bee, a New London paper of that period. Furthermore, the Medical Repository of New York for the year 1799 contains three letters to Dr. Mitchell, the editor, on the subject, two from the Rev. Henry Channing and one from Dr. Thomas Coit, both residents of New London. The first victim was Capt. Elisha Bingham who kept the Union Coffee House on Bank Street in the most populous part of the city. He was suddenly taken August 22 and died after four

days. A few days afterward his wife, son and daughter were taken down and all died. Others in the neighborhood were soon stricken and the disease spread rapidly. Following the first few cases "the next week witnessed no less than 25 deaths." It is stated by Holt that within a small space there were fifteen houses inhabited by ninety-two persons of which number ninety were infected by the disease. Thirty-three of this number died and two only escaped the fever. The disease remained practically confined to an area extending about thirty rods north and the same distance south of Capt. Bingham's house, and twenty rods in width. According to Holt, "the mortality within the aforesaid limits was equal to that among the same number of inhabitants in any part of Philadelphia in the same length of time." Miss Caulkins writes: "It was remarked that the disease attacked almost indiscriminately all within its reach; no description of people, no particular habit of constitution, escaped; large and airy dwellings, wealthy and respectable citizens, were visited with as much severity as the poorest and most crowded families in the neighborhood. Many of those who used the greatest precaution caught the disease and died; others who were greatly exposed escaped." Dr. Coit says: "We could not find any sick of the fever (two cases excepted), but those who had been either in Bingham's house, or frequented the spot from whence we concluded the infection originated."

It is not surprising that this visitation created a genuine panic in the town. A large proportion of the inhabitants who at that time in the compact part of the town numbered about 2,800 removed to a greater or less distance. The physicians, I am sorry to have to say, seemed to furnish no exception to the rule. It is with mixed feelings that I quote from Holt as follows: "Early in the sickness all the physicians, but one who was too much indisposed to practice, and another, Dr. Rawson, who was violently attacked by the fever, deserted the city, excepting Dr. Samuel H. P. Lee, to whose lot it fell alone and unassisted to combat the fury of the dreadful pestilence. And his conduct on the occasion was such as will call the warmest sentiment of gratitude and esteem from the citizens of New London, as long