The Diseases Prevalent In Both Towns Are Much The Same; And The Coast Of The Hedjaz Is Perhaps Among The Most Unhealthy Countries Of The East. Intermittent Fevers Are Extremely Common, As Are Likewise Dysenteries, Which Usually Terminate In Swellings Of The Abdomen, And Often Prove Fatal.

Few persons pass a whole year without a slight attack of these disorders; and no stranger settles at Mekka

Or Djidda, without being obliged to submit, during the first months of his residence, to one of these distempers; a fact, of which ample proof was afforded in the Turkish army, under Mohammed Aly Pacha. Inflammatory fevers are less frequent at Djidda than at Mekka; but the former place is often visited with a putrid fever, which, as the inhabitants told me, sometimes appeared to be contagious; fifty persons having been known to die of it in one day. Asamy and Fasy mention frequent epidemical diseases at Mekka: in A.H. 671, a pestilence broke out, which carried off fifty persons a day; and in 749, 793, and 829, others also infected the town: in the latter year two thousand persons died. These authors, however, never mention the plague; nor had it made its appearance in the Hedjaz within the memory of the oldest inhabitants; whence a belief was entertained, that the Almighty protected this holy province from its ravages; but, in the spring of 1815, it broke out with great violence, as I shall mention in another place, and Mekka and Djidda lost, perhaps, one-sixth of their population.

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Words from 92098 to 92353 of 182297