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DXXVI: TO BENJAMIN RUSH - Benjamin Franklin, The Works of Benjamin Franklin, Vol. VI Letters and Misc. Writings 1772-1775 [1904]

Edition used:

The Works of Benjamin Franklin, including the Private as well as the Official and Scientific Correspondence, together with the Unmutilated and Correct Version of the Autobiography, compiled and edited by John Bigelow (New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1904). The Federal Edition in 12 volumes. Vol. VI (Letters and Misc. Writings 1772-1775).

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DXXVI

TO BENJAMIN RUSH

London, 14 July, 1773.

Dear Sir:—

I received your favor of May 1st, with the pamphlet, for which I am much obliged to you. It is well written. I hope that in time the endeavors of the friends to liberty and humanity will get the better of a practice that has so long disgraced our nation and religion.

A few days after I received your packet for M. Dubourg, I had an opportunity of forwarding it to him per M. Poissonniére, physician of Paris, who kindly under took to deliver it. M. Dubourg has been translating my book into French. It is nearly printed, and he tells me he purposes a copy for you.

I shall communicate your judicious remark, relating to the septic quality of the air transpired by patients in putrid diseases, to my friend Dr. Priestley. I hope that after having discovered the benefit of fresh cool air applied to the sick, people will begin to suspect that possibly it may do no harm to the well. I have not seen Dr. Cullen’s book, but am glad to hear that he speaks of catarrhs or colds by contagion. I have long been satisfied from observation, that besides the general colds now termed influenzas (which may possibly spread by contagion, as well as by a particular quality of the air), people often catch cold from one another when shut up together in close rooms, coaches, etc., and when sitting near and conversing so as to breathe in each other’s transpiration; the disorder being in a certain state. I think, too, that it is the frouzy, corrupt air from animal substances, and the perspired matter from our bodies, which being long confined in the beds not lately used, and clothes not lately worn, and books long shut up in close rooms, contains that kind of putridity which occasions the colds observed upon sleeping in, wearing, and turning over such bed-clothes, or books, and not their coldness or dampness. From these causes, but more from too full living with too little exercise, proceed, in my opinion, most of the disorders which for about one hundred and fifty years past the English have called colds.

As to Dr. Cullen’s cold or catarrh a frigore, I question whether such an one ever existed. Travelling in our severe winters, I have suffered cold sometimes to an extremity only short of freezing, but this did not make me catch cold. And, for moisture, I have been in the river every evening two or three hours for a fortnight together, when one would suppose I might imbibe enough of it to take cold if humidity could give it; but no such effect ever followed. Boys never get cold by swimming. Nor are people at sea, or who live at Bermudas, or St. Helena, small islands, where the air must be ever moist from the dashing and breaking of waves against their rocks on all sides, more subject to colds than those who inhabit part of a continent where the air is driest. Dampness may indeed assist in producing putridity and those miasmata which infect us with the disorder we call a cold; but of itself can never by a little addition of moisture hurt a body filled with watery fluids from head to foot.1

With great esteem, and sincere wishes for your welfare, I am, sir,

Your most obedient, humble servant,

B. Franklin.

[1 ]Without proposing to meddle with a question so strictly professional as this, I think it not amiss to cite here in confirmation of the Doctor’s heretical theories about colds, the following statement made by the late Dr. John H. Griscom, Superintendent of the Commissioners of Emigration of New York, in a communication addressed to a Special Committee of the United States Senate, dated the 14th January, 1854, and during the unprecedented virulence of “ship fever” on emigrant ships arriving at the port of New York at that period.

“In the month of August, 1837, a number of ships with emigrant passengers arrived at South Amboy from Liverpool and other ports, on some of which ship fever prevailed. There was no hospital or other accommodations in the town in which the sick could be placed, and no person would admit them into private dwellings, fearing infection, at the same time they could not be left on board the ships.

An arrangement was made to land the sick passengers, and place them in an open wood, adjacent to a large spring of water, about a mile and a half from town. Rough shanties, floored with boards and covered with sails, were erected, and thirty-six patients were landed in boats as near the spring as possible, and carried in wagons to the encampment (as it was called) under the influence of a hot August sun. Of the thirty-six twelve were insensible, in the last stage of fever, and not expected to live twenty-four hours. The day after landing there was a heavy rain, and the shanties affording no protection with their sail roofs, the sick were found the next morning wet, and their bedding, such as it was, drenched with the rain. It was replaced with such articles as could be collected from the charity of the inhabitants. Their number was increased by new patients to eighty-two in all. On board the ship, which was cleansed after landing the passengers, four of the crew were taken with ship fever, and two of them died. Some of the nurses at the encampment were taken sick, but recovered. Of the whole number of eighty-two passengers taken from the ship not one died.

. . . The shanties spoken of were two in number, thirty feet long, twenty feet wide, boarded on three sides four feet up, with old sails stretched over them. The twelve who were removed from the ship in a state of insensibility were apparently in so helpless a condition that the overseer, who was a carpenter, observed, ‘well, Doctor, I think I shall have some boxes to make before many hours.’ The night after their arrival at the encampment,’ says Dr. Smith, ‘we had a violent thunder-gust, accompanied by torrents of rain. On visiting them the following morning, the clothes of all were saturated with water, in other words they had had a thorough ablution. This doubtless was a most fortunate circumstance. . . . The four sailors who sickened after the arrival of the vessel (the Phoebe) were removed to the room of an ordinary dwelling house. The medical treatment in their case was precisely similar, yet two of them died, and the others suffered from carbuncles while convalescing.’ The Doctor adds ‘My opinion is that had the eighty-two treated at the encampment been placed in a common hospital, many of them would also have fallen victims. I do not attribute their recovery so much to the remedies administered as to the circumstances in which they were placed, in other words, a good washing to begin with and an abundance of fresh air.’ ”—Editor.