New-York tribune. [volume] (New York [N.Y.]) 1866-1924, 1878-09-04
TIE PLAGUE.

TIE PLAGUE.
With every morning the account grows
darker of the swift and terrible slaughter in
the infected yellow fever dist lets of the
South. The mortality has been as great In
! Grenada as it was three hundred years ago,
from the Red Tongue in Mexico before Cor
tez came, or in Barbados in 1901 from the
New Distemper." Yet the diseases were the
same as the present scOurge. They ran the
same course, and even the poor Mexicans dis
covered and asserted that dirt and bad draln-
age were the cause. Yet Memphis and New
| Orleans in which this especial plague has been
endemic for generations, are among the foul
est and worst drained cities in the UnlOn'
| There is fault as well as misfortune here. III
| is no time, 1t is true, to lecture our miserable
| neighbOrs when Death has them in his clutches
neither is 1t the time now for them to amend
matters. Stagnant masses of filth and putre-
faction cannot be stirred up for removal when
the poison is once abroad in the atmosphere
| But it is the time for us to 90 to work here
There are streets and whole districts in New
! York bedded in filth; a stranger arriving
at one of the ferries sees and smells enough
of corruption OH his way up town to furnish
material for a dozen devastated Grenadas.
Yet this is a comparatively respectable quar-
ter of the city.
Nothing could be more noble or beautiful
than has been the eager response of the North
ern cities to the call of their Southern sisters.
A man must have a heart of stone who can
read unmoved the story which each morning
brings to us of how Corporations, Boards Of
Trade, pleasure-seekers, gay girls and little
children, actors, laborers, scholars, all hurry
forward with their outstTetched hands and
help. in the South too, look at brave martyrs
going day by day to death; the poor nurse,
the skilled physician, the Catholic priest and
Protestant mnisteT-men and women OF God,
and whom God will reward it Is a spectacle
ennobling to all human nature. Surely the
great Brother of Us all must be satisfied with
these, His friends.
But let Northern cities use their COM
mon sense as well as charity. September
bids fair to be hot enough to give
the plague full opportunity for work
if it should appear among US and there has
been very much talking but very little clean
ing done so far. We would suggest, also.
that part of the moneys sent South be used
in conveying convalescent refugees to the high
lands where the disease will be killed, instead
of to neighbOuug dirty and low villages to
spread the contagiOn further The yellow
fever never, we believe, lives at $500 feet
above sea level. There are regions much
higher than that in the Southern mountains
easily accessible by railway from the infected
districts. Another suggestion we make IS that
in cas-. of It's appearance in Northern city, no
dependence should be placed on the popular
systems Of treatment which are being pub
lished widely, intended to be applied alike to
all cases There is no disease, probably, con-
corning which doctors differ so greatly rs this.
One eminent authority orders enormous doses
of auninc and calomel; another swathes the
patient in mustard plasters; still another
freezes him under dripping Ice. This one
gives lowering medicines, that one stimulants.
The disease, too, appears under various and
conflicting forms. One man dies with
no symptom but pain in the extrem-
tiles and without an hours sickness
another passes through all the agonies of the
black vOmit, delirum, etc. Now, the truth is
that no one system of treatment is applicable
TO all these varied forms. Should we have
the yellow fever, we must have skilled ply
sicians who know the disease through actual
contact with 1t, 10 instruct our doctors now
to treat individual eases, and not depend on
any general vague code of rules.
We find, however, from the days Of its first
appearance IN Mexico until the present time,
in Spain, Africa and the West Indies the same
two prescriptions of prevention and cure
First, cleanliness second, immediate escape to
a high and dry locality. Let us Try the first
until the second becomes necessary.