Undated


Thomas Beddoes to an Unknown Correspondent, before 27 March 1807

Doctor Thomas Beddoes, the celebrated English Physician, is a great reader of American books. He has abandoned the Old School on the question of Contagion, and become a complete convert to the non-contagiousness of yellow fever. In a letter to one of his correspondents he writes thus, ‘I do not know of any country in which so much had been done for Medicine as in America; if you except the introduction of Vaccine Inoculation, the most useful practice ever fallen upon.’

Published: National Intelligencer (Washington, D.C.), 27 March, 1807, p. 3; also in the Alexandria Daily Gazette, Alexandria, Virginia, 31 March 1807 and in the Public Intelligencer, Savannah, Georgia, 23 April 1807, where it was attributed to the National Intelligencer.


The full versions of these letters with textual apparatus will be published by Cambridge University Press.