A Semi-Annual Oration, on the Origin of Pestilential Diseases

CALDWELL, Charles. A Semi-Annual Oration, on the Origin of Pestilential Diseases Delivered Before the Academy of Medicine of Philadelphia, on the 17th Day of December, 1798. By. Senior Vice- President of the Academy. Phila: Thomas and Samuel Bradford, 1799.

Caldwell was a second-year medical student at the University of Pennsylvania in 1793 when yellow fever made its appearance in Philadelphia. In this oration, Caldwell maintains that neither the epidemic of 1793, 1797 nor 1798 were exclusively of domestic origin. Though local causes might encourage disease outbreaks, an outside cause was always required to activate potentially harmful local conditions. This agent was introduced not through human contagion, but from "foul air" produced from "putrid ballast or damaged cargoes of vessels." (Miner)

From Catalog I

Caldwell's hybrid position satisfied neither Rush nor Currie, but it is in retrospect the most intellectually honest response to what was a genuinely complicated epidemiological picture. He was wrong about the mechanism -- it was mosquitoes, not ship-ballast foul air -- but he was right that neither pure localism nor pure importationism could account for all the evidence. He later founded the medical department at Transylvania University in Kentucky, spreading Rush's methods into the American interior.