find that he has been imposed upon. He will see that Mrs. Spencer's house is only opposite the way to two wooden buildings under one roof, which alone are a few feet nearer the Concordia; and he will also find, upon inquiry, that only a single shop was worked in of all those he refers to; the rest stood unoccupied. The doctor closes with saying, that " it deserves to be remembered, that the people living in the houses and shops nearest to, and immediately facing the Concordia," "were wholly and entirely free from disease." There is but the above double house that can be said "immediately to face the Concordia," and to be nearest to her; that house was then occupied in one part by a man and his wife, with three children, who all left it soon after the alarm began; but in the part occupied by M'Gee, four persons were attacked with the yellow fever, and two of them died of the disease. I cannot but hope, therefore, that when the doctor comes to discover that in the facts he thus presses with so much emphasis, the direct contrary of all he has stated is the truth, it will suggest to him the propriety of observing a little more caution how he lends his credulity to the assertions of others, or, at any rate, how he adopts them and gives them to the public as his own.

The last thing I shall take notice of in the doctor's letter, is the ingenious method he takes to escape from the testimony of Muller; for as to his repeating over again so carefully the great number of people who were on board the Concordia at different times, even were it all true as stated by him, and as I have no doubt was stated to him, I must consider it, and I think every person conversant with the nature of the disease in question will consider it, as of very little moment. In answer to Mr. Barker's cer

tificate of what Muller said to him, the doctor observes, that Mr. Barker "was under great apprehension of danger," and it was "very presumable that his state of mind and shortness of visit made him misapprehend what Muller said to him." This, to be sure, is a very short and easy way of getting rid of evidence, and if admitted, there is no longer any such thing as proof in existence. But, adds the doctor, "It deserves notice, that nothing of this kind was said either to the physician or nurse, who were with him constantly." It indeed deserves notice, that we have here the doctor's bare assertions once more, and only his assertions; but neither evidence nor presumption to support it. Who was this nurse, and who this physician? I should be extremely glad to see them. The physician, indeed, I happen to know, and I also know that from certain motives he will make no disclosures whatever. I only wish he would. If he would tell all he knows, there would soon be an end to all controversy about the origin of this disease in Brooklyn. As to the nurse, I venture to assert that Muller never had a nurse. Indeed, that there can be no room whatever for this statement about the nurse or the physician, appears from the certificates of Mr. Barker and Mrs. Smith, as given in my report to the board of health. Again, I have been assured by Mrs. Smith herself, and also by some other persons, that no one was with him even at the time of his death. While they were conversing below with the physician, a noise was heard in his room; they hastened up stairs, and Muller was found dead upon the floor, about two yards from his bed, out of which he had risen: one of the most decisive evidences of the disease of which he died. And, after all, supposing, for a moment, that Muller's declaration was not heard by the nurse and physician, it would

be, at best, but negative evidence, and could not invalidate the positive testimony on the other side. But the doctor has an argument in reserve which settles the whole business at a blow, viz. that Muller could not have brought the disease from the Havanna in his own person, because he had been thirty days and more from that place. If he could not, then it is pretty clear that he did not: but is Dr. Rodgers now to be informed, that nothing is more common than for sailors from a sickly place to retain their health during all the voyage, but to become sensible of disease shortly after reaching port and breaking bulk? This is a fact of which, I believe, few medical men are at this time of day ignorant.

However, I now state for the satisfaction of Dr. Rodgers, the following facts, copied by myself from the present health officer's book, which he was polite enough to submit to my examination. The schooner Richard arrived at the quarantine ground July 30th, 1810, from Porto Rico, after a passage of seventeen days, with a cargo of fustick and cotton. She reported that she was from a sickly port, and of course was detained, although, to appearance, she was extremely clean in all respects and in every part. She had lost one seaman on the 20th of July, after a fever of nine days, and two others, who were at the same time unwell, recovered. She was thrown down to be sheathed, and David Bell, one of her seamen, apparently in perfect health, was employed to work upon her, which he did until August 19th, when he was seized with fever, twenty days after his arrival. On the morning of the 21st, Bell was received into the hospital, where he died in about an hour with black vomit and other unequivocal symptoms of the yellow fever. On this case,

so similar to Muller's, I shall merely remark, that whatever may have been pretended of nuisances at Brooklyn, capable of generating yellow fever, no one has ever gone so far, nor I presume ever will, as to impute such nuisances to Staten-Island, always so clean and so salubrious.

On the whole, I must still retain my first impressions: that it is satisfactorily accounted for why the disease in question did prevail in Brooklyn, by the fact that a vessel from a port where the same disease prevailed at her departure, and for a long time before, lay at a wharf in Brooklyn until she was ordered back by the board of health; and on the other hand it is equally satisfactory to account why it did not prevail in New-York at the same time, in precisely the same climate, with precisely the same degree of heat and moisture, and certainly with streets and wharves far less cleanly, namely, because neither that vessel nor any other similarly situated was permitted to approach the city.

I have now disposed of every thing I thought at all material in Dr. Rodgers' letter to the editors of the Journal and Review, and will thank you, gentlemen, to give that letter a place along with this, in your next number, leaving it to the public to decide upon the evidence before them, and the arguments that have been offered on both sides of so highly interesting a question.

I am, &c.

J. D. GILLESPIE.

Observations by the Editors.

Hitherto we have abstained from making any observations on the interesting subject before us; chusing first

to put the reader in possession of all the facts that could be collected by industry on both sides of the question. Those facts are at length presented to the public, and probably some observations may now be expected from the editors.

It must be in the recollection of all who took particular interest in the controversy respecting the origin of the yellow fever in Brooklyn in the summer of 1809, that those who maintain the theory of domestic origin, failing to find any adequate causes for the appearance of such a disease, at such a place, in such a season, denied for a considerable period, that it was the yellow fever, or indeed, any epidemic whatever. It was the common bilious remittent it was even dysentery; in short it was any thing, but what it proved to be. To account for the appearance of yellow fever, by appealing to the thermometer to show the high degree of heat, or the barometer to show the great degree of moisture, was here utterly in vain; because it so happened, that the city of New-York, only separated by a river of eight hundred yards in width, was exposed to the same heat and to the same moisture, and yet continued entirely exempt from the disease. Climate, then, or "constitution of atmosphere," as they sometimes call it, in this instance, at least, as in that of the Wallabout, could have no agency in producing it. It was therefore denied that the disease which was daily becoming so fatal and so alarming, could be the yellow fever. At length, however, facts appeared too strong; and the existence of the yellow fever at Brooklyn was admitted by every body, with the exception of a single domestic gentleman of the faculty, who still continued to believe it was dysentery. Heat, moisture, and filth being their grand agents to pro