Under these circumstances the patient was induced to consent to the operation; and on the 24th of January last, the diseased mass was removed by MR. BROOKS at his Thea tre during lecture. Some hemorrhage took place on the divi sion of the parts, rendering an application of ligature necessary to several vessels. There was very little subsequent inflammation or symptomatic fever, and the wound is nearly healed. W. M. LEWIS.

Feb. 12, 1811.

To the Editors of the Medical and Physical Journal. GENTLEMEN,

IN the Number of your Journal for January last, a letter

is inserted, in which an attempt has been made by Mr. H, Earle, to deprive me of the invention of an Aneurismal Needle described under my name. As it is my intention, however, not to surrender the claim I hold to the originality of this contrivance, which is well known at St. Bartholomew's Hospital to be my own, I must beg the favour of your allowing me a place in your useful Journal, merely to shew, that I have not condescended to become the copyist of that gentleman.

I am, Gentlemen,

Yours, most respectfully,

Bartholomew Close, 94,

Feb. 14, 1811.

JOHN JAMES WATT,

For

For the Medical and Physical Journal.

Upon the Physical Causes which arrest the progress Mexican population. (Political Essay on the Kingdont of New Spain. By ALEXANDER DE HUMBOLDT. Translated by JoHN BLACK, 1811.)

"These causes are the small-pox, the cruel malady called by the Indians Matlazahuatl, and especially famine, of which the effects are felt for a long time.

The small-pox, introduced since 1520, appears only to exercise its ravages every seventeen or eighteen years. In the equinoxial regions it has, like the black vomiting and several other diseases, its fixed periods, to which it is very regularly subjected. We might say that in these countries the disposition for certain miasmata is only renewed in the natives at long intervals; for though the vessels from Europe frequently introduce the germ of the small-pox, it never becomes epidemical but after very marked intervals; a singular circumstance, which renders the disease so much the more dangerous for adults. The small-pox committed terrible ravages in 1763, and especially in 1779, in which year it carried off in the capital of Mexico alone more than nine thousand persons. Every evening tumbrels passed through the streets to receive the corpses, as at Philadelphia during the yellow fever. A great part of the Mexican youth was cut down that year.

The epidemic of 1797 was less destructive, chiefly owing to the zeal with which inoculation was propagated in the environs of Mexico, and in the bishopric of Mechoachan. In the capital of this bishopric the city of Valladolid, of 6800 individuals inoculated only 170, or 2 per cent. died; and we must also observe, that several of those who perished were inoculated at a time when they were probably already infected in the natural manner. Fifteen in the hundred died of individuals of all ages, who, without being inoculated, were victims of the natural small-pox. Several individuals, particularly among the clergy, displayed at that period a very praiseworthy patriotism, in arresting the progress of the discase by inoculation. I shall merely mention the names of two enlightened men, M. delReano, intendant of Guanaxuato, and Don Manuel Abad, penitentiary canon of the cathedral of Valladolid, whose generous and disinterested views were constantly directed towards the public good. There were then inoculated in the kingdom between 50 and 60,000 individuals. But in the month of January 1804, the vaccine inoculation was even introduced at Mexico through the activity of a res

pectable citizen, Don Thomas Murphy, who brought seve ral times the virus from North America. This introduction found few obstacles; the cow-pox appeared under the aspect of a very trivial malady; and the small-pox inoculation had already accustomed the Indians to the idea that it might be useful to submit to a temporary evil for the sake of evading a greater evil. If the vaccine inoculation, or even the ordinary inoculation, had been known in the new world in the sixteenth century, several millions of Indians would not have perished victims to the snall-pox, and particularly to the absurd treatment by which the disease was rendered so fatal. To this disease the fearful diminution of the number of Indians in California is to be ascribed. The ships of war commissioned to carry the vaccine matter into America and Asia arrived at Vera Cruz shortly after my arrival.

Don Antonio Valmis, physician general of this expedition, visited Portorico, Cuba, Mexico, and the Philippine islands ; and his stay at Mexico, where nevertheless the cow-pox was known before his arrival, contributed singularly to facilitate the propagation of this salutary preservative. In the principal cities of the kimgdom vaccine committees were formed (juntas centrales), composed of the most enlightened individuals, who, by vaccinating monthly, preserve the miasma from being lost. It is so much the less liable to be lost, as it exists in the country. M, Valmis discovered it in the environs of Valladolid, and in the village of Atlisco, near la Puebla, in the udders of the Mexican cows. The commission having fulfilled the beneficent views of the king of Spain, we may indulge a hope that through the influence of the clergy, and especially of the religious missionaries, vaccination will be gradually introduced into the very interior of the country. The voyage of M. Valmis will thus remain for ever memorable in the annals of history. The Indies saw for the first time those vessels, which were formerly freighted, only with instruments of carnage and destruction, bearing about the germ of relief and consolation to distressed and suffering humanity.

The arrival of the armed frigates in which M. Valmis made the circuit of the Atlantic and Pacific oceans gave rise on several coasts to one of the most simple, and therefore most affecting, ceremonies. The bishops, military gover nors, and persons of greatest distinction, repaired to the shore, where they took in their arms the children who were to carry the cow-pox to the indigenous Americans and the Malays of the Philippine islands, and, followed with public acclamations, they laid at the foot of the altar those precious preservative deposits, returning thanks to the Supreme Being

for

for having been the witnesses of so happy an event. We must have some knowledge of the ravages occasioned by the small-pox in the torrid zone, and especially among a race of men whose physical constitution seems adverse to cutaneous eruptions, in order to feel all the importance of M. Jenner's discovery. It is a much greater blessing for the equinoctial part of the new continent than for the temperate climate of the old.

It may be useful to relate here a fact of some importance, for those who take an interest in the progress of vaccination. It was unknown at Lima till the month of November 1802. At that period the small-pox prevailed on the coast of the South Sea. A merchant vessel, Santo Domingo de la Calzada, put into Lima in, the passage from Spain to Manilla. An individual had had the good sense to send by this vessel vaccine matter to the Philippine islands. They availed themselves of this opportunity at Lima; and M. Unanue, professor of anatomy, and author of an excellent physiological treatise on the climate of Peru*, vaccinated several individuals by means of the matter brought by the merchant vessel. No pustule appeared; and the virus appeared either altered or too weak. However, M. Unanue having observed that all the vaccinated individuals had a very mild small-pox, employed this variolous matter to render, if possible by the ordinary inoculation, the disease less fatal. He thus perceived in an indirect way the effects of a vaccination supposed to have failed.

It was accidentally discovered in the course of the same epidemic in 1802, that the beneficent effect of vaccination had been long known to the country people among the Peruvian Andes. A negro slave had been inoculated for the smallpox, in the house of the Marquis de Valleumbroso who shewed no symptom of the disease. They were going to repeat the inoculation, when the young man told them that he was certain of never having the small-pox, because in milking cows in the Cordillera of the Andes, he had had a sort of cutaneous eruptions, caused, as the Indian herdsmen said, by the contact of certain tubercules sometimes found on the udders of COWS. Those who have this eruption, said the negro, never take the small-pox. The Africans, and especially the Indians, display great sagacity in observing the character, habits, and

*This work, which displays an intimate acquaintance with the French and English literature, bears the title of Observaciones sobre el clima de Lima y sus influencias en los seres organizados en especial el hombre, por el Dr. D. Hipolito Unanue. Lima, 1806. I i

(No. 145.)

diseases

diseases of the animals with which they live. We need not therefore be astonished, that, on the introduction of horned cattle into America, the lower people remarked that the pustules on the udders of cows communicated to the herdsmen a species of benignant small-pox, and that those once infected are secure from the general contagion during the epochs when the disease is epidemical.

The matlazahuatl, a discase peculiar to the Indian race, seldom appears more than once in a century. It raged in a particular manner in 1545, 1576, and 1736. It is called a plague by the Spanish authors. As the latest epidemic took place at a time when medicine was not considered a science, even in the capital, we have no exact data as to the matla zahuatl. It bears certainly some analogy to the yellow fever or black vomiting; but it never attacks white people, whether Europeans or descendants from the natives. The individuals of the race of Caucasus* do not appear subject to this. mortal typhus, while, on the other hand, the yellow fever or black vomiting very seldom attacks the Mexican Indians. The principal site of the vomito prieto is the maritime region, of which the climate is excessively warm and humid; but the matlazahuatl carries terror and destruction into the very interior of the country, to the central table-land, aud the coldest and most arid regions of the kingdom.

Father Torribio a Franciscan, better known by his Mexican name of Motolinia, asserts that the small-pox at its introduction in 1520, by a negro slave of Narvaez, carried off the half of the inhabitants of Mexico. Torquemada advances the hazardous opinion that in the two matlazahuatl epidemics of 1545 and 1576, 800,000 Indians died in the former, and 2,000,000 in the latter. But when we reflect on the difficulty with which we can at this day estimate, in the eastern part of Europe, the number of those who fall victims to the plague, we shall very reasonably be inclined to doubt if the viceroys Mendoza and Almanza, governors of a recently conquered country, were able to procure an enumeration of the Indians cut off by the matlazahuatl. I do not accuse the two monkish historians of want of veracity; but there is very little probability that their calculation is founded on exact data.

* Who are the individuals of the race of Caucasus? The Europeans. So at least we learn from the context, where they are opposed to the Mexican Indians. This involves the theory of the mountains of Asia being the nursery of the old continent. Every one, however, will not so easily be able to understand Europeans by this denomination. Such attempts to elevate the style, at the expence of perspicuity, can never enough be reprobated. Trans.

A