Benjamnin F. Butler, Butler's Book: Autobiography and Personal Reminiscences of Major-General Benjamin Butler

“ [400] try an experiment. I shall keep you here thirty days, and if you die in that time I will beg the doctor's pardon for doubting his skill; if you don't, it will be just as well as though you had gone home.” Imagine his disgust and his hard feeling at the moment. But we lived to be afterwards the very best of friends. He did not die nor was his life in any more danger than mine.

I found a map showing the localities of the city; the portions where the yellow fever usually raged being indicated by heavier shading. I found by the professor's book that the fever had usually originated in the immediate vicinity of the French market. I rode around and examined the French market and a number of other localities, and I thought I detected why it raged in those spots; they were simply astonishingly filthy with rotting matter. In the French market the stall women were accustomed to drop on the floor around their stalls all the refuse made in cleaning their birds, meats, and fish. Here it was trodden in and in. This had been going on for a century, more or less.

The fact that the disease flourished so much in the vicinity of decaying and putrid animal matter led me to the conclusion that this prolific cause of the typhus and typhoid fever must have something to do with el vomito. Upon my further diagnosis of the disease I found that it had also the peculiar characteristics of the congestive fevers caused by malarial exhalations from decaying vegetable matter. It seemed to me, as near as I could get at it, two intermingled or conjoint fevers affecting the patient's system at the same time. Therefore I argued that if we could get rid of the producing causes of either one of those species of fever we might not have a yellow fever even if the people were subjected to the cause of the other fever. Examining further, as well as I could, it seemed to me that it was nearly impossible in New Orleans to remove the seeds or germs of malarial fever,--the fever called in the West fever and ague,--because vegetation blossoming in February died in August, and under the hottest possible sun was soon decaying. Moreover, the vegetable growth was so enormous that in the summer it was present in a decaying condition everywhere. Therefore to attempt to get rid of the decomposed vegetable matter would be impracticable.

Turning my attention to the decaying animal matter and filth, I came to the conclusion that this could be disposed of so that the city