The New York herald., 1873-10-04
Tne yellow Fever IN Shreveport
what Can BE Done to succor,
What TO Prevent9

4
of the movements Of the yellow fever in
the South with the same panied feelings
that it would listen to the fluctuations of q
tide of death creeping up in CHASTITY breakers
to city of life, or receding in sullen waves
with the wreck of ruin behind When we
know that the homes laid waste and the lives
| gone out are those of our fellow citizens the
heart is moved with greater pity and compass
sion, although the horrors be ever so re-
mote from our doors. The dark plague wave
has rolled in its foetid fatality over the city
of Shreveport, La. We hear Of physicians
dying by their patients beds; Of dauntless
priests yielding up their lives, true unto
death in the service of their Master; of the
people dying in horror Of desolation and
isolation which recalls the gloomiest pages of
Defoe in his terribly realistic picture of the
Great Plague in London. New York
cannot better test the feeling of ap-
preaching doom which the coming of
the yellow fever causes than by
recalling how the mere rumor of its advent in
the Lower Bay has set the fears of the city
into activity. 1t is true that we feel in great
measure secure against its inroads, but it is
not more than three years since the little
graveyard on Governors Island received
large and sudden accession of dead from
among the garrison, cut off by this
terrible visitant in few days. We
feel something of the gravity Of the disease,
when we learn that the Quarantine physicians
hide the occasional ship-arriving sufferers
from public knowledge lest the mere knowl-
edge of their condition should produce dan
gerous scare. Many times more horrible than
its brother plague the cholera, it has the pre-
eninence in loathsomeness in malignity over
all the scourges that remind us OF the tremen-
dous uncertainty of life.
There comes an hour in the history of every
country when afliction seems to fall with
particularly heavy hand upon some one por-
ton, and the whole community is called
upon to lament and sympathize. This is
the case with Shreveport now, and GER
tainly the accounts which come thither are
enough to thrill every heart that is not
drugged with apathy. The CHASTITY hands of
the pestilence are laid upon her. Yellow
fever has marked her for its own. 1t is easy
to let the imagination run away with one in
picturing the details of such an affliction as
this but it is not easy to exaggerate the
experienced by the wretched inhabl-
tants. Yellow fever is peculiarly
loathsome disease. Everything which
can complete an ensemble of hideousness and
agony enters into its accessories. In all its
varieties it is terrible. 1t is the bosom friend
of the king of terrors. 1t rides position upon
deaths pale horse. 1t strikes down victims
right and left, without respect to age, sex or
apparently to those conditions which deter
mine health and disease. 1t exhausts every
art in accomplishing the horrible victory that
ends in death. Sometimes its approaches are
insidious, and it turks in the frame like q
cumulative poison. Sometimes it falls like
an avalanche or blasts like lightning. Often
those of its symptoms which are most fatal
bear treacherous resemblance to health.
There are cases in which those who are dying
of it walk about declaring they are well up
to the last moment There are others, and
these are by tar the greatest number, who
yield at once as though stricken with
dart, and in whom the dry and
swollen tongue, the agony-twisted features,
the icy hands and feet and the horrible black
vomit proclaim quick dissolution. There are
patients who lose themselves in muttering de
liriums, dwelling with horrible iteration that
resembles idiocy upon happy and distant
past and there are those who retain full con-
sciousness up to the latest moment of the
mortal strife, and have an exquisite sense of
the things of time while huttering on the
black verge of eternity. But under all its as
poets yellow fever is terrible. 1t is one of
those plaques which in q few months undo the
work of years, causing the grass to grow in
| public thoroughfares and moss to settle upon
the very market places. Where it reigns the
undertaken fattens like respectable ghoul,
turning his natural instincts into the current
| of trade.
| New York has never been behindhand in
giving aid to sister cities visited with afflic-
ton. 1t is particularly BETTING that such aid
should be proffered now. We cannot afford
to lose moment. Humanity calls to us to
send instant and effectual aid. Almost always,
in such an hour as this, men and women with
the spirit of martyrs arise and show the world
the beauty Of holiness, the angelhood Of duty.
| They reach that altitude than which the
psalmist tells US man is little lower, and force
the most cynical Of US to respect humanity.
These are the kind Of men and women whom
Shreveport needs at present. Almost isolated
from the rest of the world, panic raging in
the place, physicians dead and dying, it is
necessary that something should be done at
once. We are glad to see that some of the
cities near to Shreveport are exerting them
selves in her behalf, and shall be greatly sur
/ prised if New York does not render speedy