Historia de Barcelona

Letter from Docter Pariset, Barcelona,

Yes, the disease that desolates Barcelona is certainly the yellow fever of America.

Yes, it has been imported.

Yes, and I repeat it a thousand times, it is contagious. Let us hope, that the facts, which we shall accumulate, will completely confute the partisans of the contrary system.

Yes, this fever is a thousand times more fatal to commerce, than the most rigorous system of quarantine. With five days of good police and firmness, Barcelona and her commerce would have been preserved, and that by the confession of the anti-contagionists of this country. But what! they squabble and dispute together, whilst the evil enters, ravages, kills and they know not how to cure it; here, all labour, all industry, all prosperity, prostrates itself and dies for a long time; the heart even becomes depraved, the father flies from his children, and all human feelings are lost. Oh! that the administration may act with vigour, and not compromise itself in this mass of folly and iniquity.

The municipal junta was informed a few days since, that there was a house shut up in Nomad Street [?], from which issued a most offensive smell, and that every now and then the cries of a child were heard. They proceeded to the house, opened it, and found the corpse of a young man, disfigured by the yellow fever, who had been dead four or five days; near this corpse was that of a dying woman: this body also much disfigured, but still retained a portion of warmth, and upon it was found a child at the breast, which, tormented by famine, was crying while it gnawed the bosom of its mother.

A public house, which had fifteen inhabitants, has lost eleven; the house next to it had twenty-seven, of which twenty-four are dead.

In Nao Street [Carrer Nou de la Rambla] are three establishments of thirty-six persons; all died.