physician, M. Juliac, who had studied medicine at Montpelier. His
small house contained a collection of things the most various, but
which were all calculated to interest travellers. We found works of
literature and natural history; notes on meteorology; skins of the
jaguar and of large aquatic serpents; live animals, monkeys,
armadilloes, and birds. Our host was principal surgeon to the royal
hospital of Porto Cabello, and was celebrated in the country for his
skilful treatment of the yellow fever. During a period of seven years
he had seen six or eight thousand persons enter the hospitals,
attacked by this cruel malady. He had observed the ravages that the
epidemic caused in Admiral Ariztizabal's fleet, in 1793. That fleet
lost nearly a third of its men; for the sailors were almost all
unseasoned Europeans, and held unrestrained intercourse with the
shore. M. Juliac had heretofore treated the sick as was commonly
practised in Terra Firma, and in the island, by bleeding, aperient
medicines, and acid drinks. In this treatment no attempt was made to
raise the vital powers by the action of stimulants, so that, in
attempting to allay the fever, the languor and debility were
augmented. In the hospitals, where the sick were crowded, the
mortality was often thirty-three per cent among the white Creoles; and
sixty-five in a hundred among the Europeans recently disembarked.
Since a stimulant treatment, the use of opium, of benzoin, and of
alcoholic draughts, has been substituted for the old debilitating
method, the mortality has considerably diminished. It was believed to
be reduced to twenty in a hundred among Europeans, and ten among
Creoles;* even when black vomiting, and haemorrhage from the nose,
ears, and gums, indicated a high degree of exacerbation in the malady.
(* I have treated in another work of the proportions of mortality in
the yellow fever. (Nouvelle Espagne volume 2 pages 777, 785, and 867.)
At Cadiz the average mortality was, in 1800, twenty per cent; at