Personal Narrative Of Travels To The Equinoctial Regions Of America During The Years 1799-1804 - Volume 1 - By Alexander Von Humboldt And Aime Bonpland.
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In 1696, a bishop of
Venezuela, Diego de Banos, dedicated a church (ermita) to Santa
Rosalia of Palermo, for having delivered the capital from the
scourge of the black vomit (vomito negro), which is said to have
raged for the space of sixteen months.
A mass celebrated every year
in the cathedral, in the beginning of September, perpetuates the
remembrance of this epidemic, in the same manner as processions
fix, in the Spanish colonies, the date of the great earthquakes.
The year 1696 was indeed very remarkable for the yellow fever,
which raged with violence in all the West India Islands, where it
had only begun to gain an ascendancy in 1688. But how can we give
credit to an epidemical black vomit, having lasted sixteen months
without interruption, and which may be said to have passed through
that very cool season when the thermometer at Caracas falls to
twelve or thirteen degrees? Can the typhus be of older date in the
elevated valley of Caracas, than in the most frequented ports of
Terra Firma. According to Ulloa, it was unknown in Terra Firma
before 1729. I doubt, therefore, the epidemic of 1696 having been
the yellow fever, or real typhus of America. Some of the symptoms
which accompany yellow fever are common to bilious remittent
fevers; and are no more characteristic than haematemeses of that
severe disease now known at the Havannah and Vera Cruz by the name
of vomito. But though no accurate description satisfactorily
demonstrates that the typhus of America existed at Caracas as early
as the end of the seventeenth century, it is unhappily too certain,
that this disease carried off in that capital a great number of
European soldiers in 1802.
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