--- title: Times and Seasons description: Issues of 1845 to 1846. authors: - Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints editors: - Ebenezer Robinson - Don Carlos Smith - Smith, Joseph, Jr. - Taylor, John collections: - periodicals tags: - newspaper - times-and-seasons - nauvoo - nineteenth-century periodical: Times and Seasons volume: 6 number: 9 published: 1845-05-15 publisher: E. Robinson and D. C. Smith; later John Taylor publisher_place: Commerce and Nauvoo, Illinois language: en type: article reference: "“The Plague,” *Times and Seasons* 6, no. 9 (May 15, 1845): 900–901." printed_title: THE PLAGUE. source: url: https://archive.org/details/per_utah-and-the-mormons_times-and-seasons_1845-05-15_6_9 transcription: Text from the Centerplace.org transcription (https://www.centerplace.org/history/ts/v6n09.htm), with its page breaks; this Internet Archive scan is the reference copy (its OCR was used only as a witness for OCR repair) identifier: per_utah-and-the-mormons_times-and-seasons_1845-05-15_6_9 start_page: 900 end_page: 901 curator_note: A Mormon newspaper published by the church in Nauvoo; included for historical study. Inclusion does not imply endorsement. rights: status: public-domain basis: US publication 1845 (Nauvoo, Illinois); published before 1931, so public domain in the United States source: https://archive.org/details/per_utah-and-the-mormons_times-and-seasons_1845-05-15_6_9 publication_year: 1845 --- # The Plague The last arrival brings intelligence that the Plague had broke out at Jerusalem, and was carrying off forty persons daily. As many of our citizens are preparing for a trip to the Mediterranean, and may extend their voyage this summer to the Holy Land, it may be well, unless they are more anxious to lay their bones in the sacred soil than to return home and relate their adventures, to keep clear of it for the present. It is a singular fact, that while the triumphs of the healing art and of surgery, have been great and varied, while improvements in medical treatment have almost mastered every disease, little or no progress has been made in accounting for the origin of the Plague, in deciding beyond doubt, whether the disease was positively epidemic or contagious, or ascertaining beyond question and by practical illustration, a preventive and cure. We have mastered in a measure, the terrors of yellow Fever, by having ascertained that it is an epidemic and an imported disease, and not per se a contagious one. We have even simplified the treatment with evident success. Cholera, a disease yet more frightful by the suddenness of its results, practical experience has demonstrated that it is an epidemic, and confined to no locality, and by prompt measures can easily be mastered. Not so however with the Plague, a disease which at intervals has ravaged all parts of the world, with the most sweeping results, for the last 3000 years, without any visible improvement having been made in detecting causes and applying the remedy. Dr. Cullen considers Plague "a typhus fever in the highest degree contagious, and accompanied with extreme debility." Dr. Mackensie, who practised [practiced] thirty years in Constantinople, considered the annual fever called the Plague nothing more than the ordinary hospital of jail fever, when attended with inflammatory swellings of the glands, with carbuncles, blotches on the skin, gangreen [gangrene] and other impurities of the blood, all of which prove rapidly fatal. No two physicians are agreed as to the character and treatment of the disease, but it is evident that the Plague universally appears in low, confined, crowded, and filthy parts of a city, and hence we infer that it is of the same class of pestilential and contagious diseases, as small pox, jail fevers, &c., arising from an impure, close, and morbid atmosphere, and consequently may be prevented by cleanliness, and good living. And in this way we may ourselves take a wholesome lesson, in preventing numerous families crowding tenements; introducing pure air, and the free use of pure water, and keeping the streets clean. The first appearance of the Plague was in Egypt in 1491, B. C., and so sudden and alarming was its progress, that the Israelites owed their deliverance to it, and were permitted to depart from apprehension that their numbers and confined mode of living would increase the pestilence. (Exodus xii.) It also prevailed in the wilderness under the name of the fire of the Lord, (Fever: see Numbers xi.) From that year until the sixty eighth year of the Christian Era, it prevailed among the Philistines in Canaan; in the Grecian camp at Troy; it prevailed at Rome, Athens, Carthage, and Numidia; and in A. D. 407 it raged over Europe, Asia, and Africa, and so on every few years in various parts until it reached the French army in Egypt in 1799. The contagious character of this disease was clearly manifested in the Plague which prevailed in Marseilles in the year 1720, introduced by three ships from the East. The first person, a woman, attacked with it was taken to the hospital, and all the nurses, doctors, and apothecaries; confessors, attendants, and servants, besides 300 orphans and 230 galley slaves, died within a few days, when the pestilence spread in every direction. Animal effluvia alone in a confined space, and among so many prostrated, was sufficient to spread the disease; yet, on the other hand, it is maintained, that in a pure atmosphere, Plague cannot be communicated [communicated], and that cordons and lazarettoes are not available. Odessa in the Black Sea, has an admirably arranged lazaretto, and strict quarantine laws, and yet not long ago, the Plague broke out in that place. In 1835, Mehemet Ali of Egypt, placed a cordon of five hundred persons around the Harem, to keep out the Plague, yet it obtained admittance. The Persians, from air, room, and exercise, seldom catch the Plague, and Clot Bey, who was in this country, and at one time had charge of the Plague hospitals in Egypt, twice inoculated himself with pus, without taking the Plague, and maintained that whenever it broke out in close and confined districts, the preventive was to clear out the residents to a purer atmosphere and close up the infected districts, precisely as successfully as we do in Yellow Fever. Whenever an undoubted case of Yellow Fever appears, abandon the position and retreat before it. If there are no inhabitants to feed upon, and the disease is epidemic, it makes slow progress and soon disappears. In 1819 the subject [subject] of the Plague was brought before the British Parliament for the purpose of examining into the character and value of the quarantine regulations, and a very searching inquiry was instituted. It was decided to the satisfaction of all that Plague ouly [only] appeared in crowded, ill-ventilated, and filthy localities; or from the miasm of pestiferous souls. It is not the air of Turkey, Syria, or Egypt, that generates it. It forms in the swamps of Egypt and revels in the filth of Constantinople. Dr. Hancock says, the preventive consists in the cleanliness of towns, protecting the poor against famine, and encouraging industry and activity.-(N. Y. Prophet.)