have mistaken some fevers peculiar to the country for that disease.[1]
Without any intention of finding fault or of making comparisons, I cannot, however, help noticing that typhoid fever and smallpox are endemic in many of the cities of the United States, and that in Washington, for instance, cases of these diseases can be found throughout the year. It would surely be unjust to infer from this that Washington or the United States is a source of danger to the world. Yet newspapers in the United States have often undertaken to pervert public opinion against Haiti by representing it as the seat of all kinds of diseases. According to them the Federal Government ought to make it its duty to take possession of the island in order to compel its inhabitants to comply with the rules of hygiene.
These declamations have had a bad effect on the minds of those who, knowing nothing about Haiti, are led to believe that her sanitary condition is a great danger. This opinion would not long be entertained if the sanitary condition of this country were compared in good faith with the numerous contagious and infectious diseases which claim so many victims in some cities of the United States. However, this cannot justly be made a subject of reproach to the Americans; for few people take as much care as they do of public health; few nations are as prompt as the United States always is to ward off and fight against diseases, regardless of cost or sacrifice. The endemic smallpox and typhoid fever which exist in Washington do not prevent that city from being exceedingly clean and healthy. Nowhere is there more ease, nor are the rules of hygiene, prophylactic or otherwise, better enforced than there. Nevertheless, foreigners who have lived in Washington but a short time have often been heard to say that it is a dangerous place on account of its diseases. This hastily formed opinion has as slight a
- ↑ Dr. Léon Audain, Pathologie Intertropicale.
Yet Mr. St. John, in Haiti or the Black Republic, strives to create the impression that the climate of Port-au-Prince is most unhealthy.
