Cholera at Newport
1832
Boston Medical and Surgical Journal
can scarcely discern the difference ; and when the patient is free from gastric sinking, as in the milder cases he is tolerably so for several hours every day, a superficial observer, at these times of remission of the distress of the stomach and its attendant symptoms, usually detects no tinge of typhus syncopalis. Such difficulties in the diagnosis, it is said, do not occur after cholera has been once developed, or at any rate not till the collapse is removed, and a consecutive fever
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... s. -I will allow myself to make a brief but circumstantial statement of the only cases of cholera (two in number) which have existed in this town. I am the more willing to do so, in consideration of the erroneous rumors and statements tbat have been circulated upon the occasion, abroad, I find, as well as amongst ourselves, some of which, it seems, have created a corresponding apprehension respecting the safety of two members of your family, at present on a visit here. Having availed myself of ample means of acquiring a satisfactory knowledge of the most important circumstances connected with these cases, the correctness of the following statement may be relied on. Two unmarried females, of about 38 and 42 years of age respectively, were the unhappy subjects-both of them persons of ordinarily good constitutions. They left Montgomery county, forty miles above Albany, where they had been spending several weeks on a visit, about the twelfth of July, in perfect health-took water passage to Albany, where they remained four hours on board the steamboat, in which they arrived at New York, after an ordinary passage-landed on the west side, and passed immediately over to the east side of the city, through the upper part of it, to the packet Hero, lying there, as passengers for Newport, and remained on board, with 35 other passengers, the four days previous to her sailing, which was on the morning of Tuesday, the 17th. After a passage of 24 hours, arrived in our harbor the next day about noon, where the vessel was immediately quarantined near Rose Island, all the passengers but eight or nine taking up their quarters at the United States barracks at that island, fitted up for quarantine purposes. The two cholera patients above-mentioned were amongst the small number that remained on board the vessel. All the passengers remaining well on the evening of the 24th, they were, by an order of the Board of Health, released from quarantine at sun-rise next morning (unfortunately without the health officers ascertaining that serious illness had occurred on board the vessel, in these two instances, in the course of the night). Two hours after, these patients, with the other passengers, landed in the town at the head of Bannister's wharf, and were conveyed in a carriage to the house of a relative in Spring Street.
doi:10.1056/nejm183208220070202
fatcat:xryfzivvznhvfkdmmsfpg6m7um