[21] “Statistical Report on the Sickness, Mortality, and Invaliding among the Troops in the West Indies.” Prepared from the Records of the Army Medical Department and War-Office Returns. London, 1838. It has been objected to these Reports that they embrace only one class of lives. But this does not diminish their value, for the lives they report on are presumed to be the selected lives of men in the prime of life.
In corroboration of the same views, amounting in fact to a rejection of the favourite hypothesis of the professors of the healing art--namely, that this fever originated in the miasma of marshes near the station, this careful and honest observer, whose merits as such have subsequently been fully tested in the celebrated Crimean inquiry, makes this further remark:--“The hypothesis that this fever originates from the miasma of marshes in the immediate vicinity of the station, as elsewhere it has been supposed to do, is directly opposed to the fact of the Isles de Loss, Acera, and the peninsula of Sierra Leone itself, being so subject to it, though all are in a certain degree remote from the operation of any such agency. If it be referred to similar exhalations wafted to the distance of several miles, how is its prevalence to be accounted for at Fernando Po, a mountainous region, and bordering on a mainland still more so, and where, so far as can be ascertained, no such agency is in operation? Instances of disease having raged with the same violence on the rocky Isles de Loss and the sandy wastes of Senegal, as in those parts of the coasts where vegetation is most dense, preclude the likelihood of it originating in a superabundance of that agency. In every description of situation along the coast has this scourge of Europeans been found to prevail. The low, swampy Gambia, the barren Isles de Loss, the beautifully-diversified features of Sierra Leone, the open and park-like territory around Acera, the lone, jungle-covered hills of Cape Coast Castle, and the rugged, mountainous island of Fernando Po, however different in aspect, have all exhibited the same remarkable uniformity in giving birth to the disease.”
It may, indeed, be objected that the fevers of Western Africa differ essentially from those traceable to the deltas of rivers, and to the lowlands alternately inundated and exposed to a high temperature, of more temperate climates; but I see no good reason in favour of such an opinion. The tables of sickness and mortality distinctly state that the fevers were intermittents and remittents, but mainly remittents, and that continued or ardent fever was scarcely present; whilst in Canada precisely the reverse is the case, intermittents prevailing to a great extent, remittents being comparatively rare. It would seem, however, that whether or not these fevers spring from a common cause, the temperature of the locality greatly influences the character of the disease.