In the first part of The Age of Reason, written during the French Revolution and completed we are told only a matter of hours before his arrest, Paine devotes some pages to a general account of astronomy as an introduction to his ideas on Christian theology. It is worth looking at this account in the light of knowledge as it was then and as it is now, and also to consider the sources of Paine’s information. 

He begins with a comment on the ‘plurality of worlds’, an idea from the ancient philosophers gaining acceptance in scientific circles in the eighteenth century by virtue of the work of Halley and Herschell, indicating the vastness of space and the lack of uniqueness in the existence of the earth. 

He then describes the solar system – the sun and its six satellites or worlds, all in annual motion around the sun, some satellites having their own satellites or moons in attendance, each world keeping its own track (the ecliptic) around the sun. Each world spins around itself (rotates on its own axis) and this causes day and night. Most worlds, in their self-rotation, are tilted against their line of movement around the sun (the obliquity of the ecliptic) and Paine quotes the correct figure for earth of 231/2°. It is this tilt that is responsible for the changing seasons and for the variation in the length of day and night over the world and throughout the seasons. Earth makes 365 rotations in one year’s orbit of the sun. 

The six planets are then described with their distances from the sun. These figures are incorrect now but the figures Paine gives for the earth’s distance, 88 million miles, agrees with the eighteenth century figure derived from Kepler’s Laws of about 1620. In 1772 Bode formulated his empirical law of planetary distances giving the measurements more accurately than hitherto, but this information would not have permeated the circles in which Paine moved after his departure for America. 

As proof that it is possible for man to know these distances he cites the fact that for centuries the precise date and time of eclipses and also the passage of a planet like Venus across the face of the sun (a transit) have been calculated and forecast. 

Beyond the solar system, ‘far beyond all power of calculation’ (until Bessel calculated the distance of 61 Cygni in 1838) are the ‘fixed’ stars, and these fixed stars ‘continue always at the same distance from each other, and always in the same place, so does the sun in the centre of the system’. William Herschel! communicated to the Royal Society in 1783 that this was not in fact so, and that all stars were moving but at rates indiscernible as yet to man. Paine repeats a current idea that these ‘fixed’ stars and suns probably all have their own planets in attendance upon them. Thus the immensity of space. 

‘All our knowledge of science is derived from the revolutions of those several planets or worlds of which our system is composed make in their circuit round the sun’. He regards this multiplicity as a benefit bestowed by the Creator – otherwise, all that matter in one globe with no revolutionary motion (there are echoes of Newton here) would have deprived our senses and our scientific knowledge, – it is from the sciences that all the mechanical are that contribute so much to our earthly felicity and comfort are derived’. Paine even suggests that the devotional gratitude of man is due to the Creator for this plurality. 

The same opportunities of knowledge are available to the inhabitants of neighbouring planets and to the inhabitants of planets of other suns in the universe. The idea of a society of worlds Paine finds cheerful – a happy contrivance of the almighty for the instruction of mankind. What then of the Christian faith and the ‘solitary and strange conceit that the Almighty, with millions of worlds equally dependent on his protection, should devote all his care to this world and come to die in it? Has every world an Eve, an apple, a serpent and a redeemer?’ And so to the rest of The Age of Reason. 

Where did Paine obtain his astronomical information and instruction? It is unlikely he had any books with him, he certainly did not have a bible. Paris, seething with the Revolution, had the astronomer Jean-Sylvain Badly as mayor until his execution in 1793. Condorcet (author of Progress of the Human Spirit) and Lavoisier (the father of modern chemistry) were deeply involved and died in the Revolution. Laplace (‘the French Newton’) and the astronomer Joseph Jerome Lefrangois de Lalande were also in and around Paris at this time. But all these scientists, like Paine, would have been too busy to teach or discuss astronomy. So Paine would have had to recall the lectures and practical demonstrations he attended in London before he went to America. They were given by Benjamin Martin, James Ferguson and Dr. John Bevis. It is worthwhile looking at the careers of these three men, mentioned only by surname early in The Age of Reason, because the facts, derived from the Dictionary of National Biography, afford some light on Paine’s life in London. 

Benjamin Martin (1704-1782). A ploughboy to begin with, he began to teach the ‘three Rs’ at Guildford while studying to become a mathematician, instrument- maker, and general compiler of information! He read Newton’s Opticks (1705) and became an ardent follower of his ideas. He used a £500 legacy to buy instruments and books in order to become an itinerant lecturer. He had over thirty major publications to his name as well as a number of inventions. He perfected the Orrery (not named after its inventor, as Paine states, but after the patron of the copier of the invention!), and used his own version in his lectures. He lived in London at Hadley’s Quadrant in Fleet Street, from 1740 onwards. He died following attempted suicide in 1782. 

James Ferguson (1710-1776). A shepherd-boy in Banffshire at the age of ten. He took up medicine at Edinburgh but gave up to sketch embroidery patterns and then to paint portraits and continue his interest in astronomy. He used the income from his painting to enable him to begin as a teacher and lecturer in London in 1748, where he had arrived five years before. His book, Astronomy explained on Sir Isaac Newton’s Principles (1756), went to at least thirteen editions and was used by William Herschel! for his own study of astronomy. George III called on Ferguson for tuition in mechanics, and he was made a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1763. He became a busy lecturer in and around London, sometime also travelling to Newcastle, Derby, Bath and Bristol for speaking engagements. He occasionally had public disagreements with his wife – even in the middle of lectures! 

Dr. John Bevis (1693-1771). He studied medicine at Oxford and travelled widely in France and Italy before settling in London prior to 1730. Newton’s Opticks was his favourite reading matter, and in 1738 he gave up his practice and moved to Stoke Newington where he built his own observatory. Here, and at Greenwich, assisting Edmund Halley (who died in 1742) he did much astronomical work, and made a unique star-atlas, the Uranographia Brittanica, the plates of which, however, were sequestered in chancery when the printer, John Neale, became bankrupt, and earned a reputation (internationally) as an astronomer. When Nevil Maskelyne became Astronomer Royal following the death of the Rev. Nathaniel Bliss in 1764, Bevis, who had hoped for the appointment himself, returned to his medical practice, setting up at the Temple [London]. He was made a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1765. But astronomy got him in the end, for, continuing his studies, he was quickly from his telescope one day he fell, sustaining injuries from which he died. It could only have been at this period in his life, at the Temple, as a FRS, that Paine knew him. `As soon as I was able I purchased a pair of globes, and attended the philosophical lectures of Martin and Ferguson, and afterward acquainted with Dr. Bevis of the society called the Royal Society, then living in the Temple, and an excellent astronomer’. 

Moncure Conway in his Life of Paine mentions that [Thomas ‘Clio’] Rickman assigns the period of instruction in astronomy to the year 1767, but that he himself preferred the earlier time of 1757, when Paine would have been twenty years of age. Moreover, he suggests that Paine would have been too poor to afford globes in 1766-7. A study of the lives of his mentors shows clearly that he met Martin and Fergusson fairly certainly at the earlier time, but Dr. Bevis only at the later period, having bought his globes, terrestrial and celestial, ten years previously. On the first occasion he was a staymaker with Mr. Morris of Hanover Street; on his second he was teaching at Mr. Goodman’s and then in Kensington. 

There were some important events taking place in astronomy at this time but they seem to have escaped Paine’s notice. William Herschel discovered the seventh, telescopic , planet in 1781. He wanted to call it ‘George’s Star’, but it is now called Uranus. The scientists in Paris would have known all about this important discovery but one supposes that there would have been no occasion to discuss it with Paine; in any case he did not speak French fluently. There had been transits of Venus across the sun in 1761 and 1769 (the only occasions that century) and Paine mentions them in a footnote to prove how man can know sufficient to predict these and similar events. There must have been occasions of much general public comment – especially when scientists were trying to calculate accurately the distance of the sun from earth at these events. And then in 1789, Herschel made his great forty foot telescope, the envy of astronomers everywhere, indeed, the National Assembly was later to promote a prize for such an undertaking. However, time, scarcity of the necessary metals and shortage of money prevented any such project succeeding in stricken France. 

Thomas Paine had minimal experience at the eyepiece of a telescope and he showed no inclination later in his life to pursue astronomical studies. But in these brief pages of The Age of Reason he shows he has gained a very clear understanding of the solar system from those early days in London.

The post Thomas Paine’s Astronomy  appeared first on .

Standing at the entrance to Lympstone Harbour on the river Exe in  Devon was a pillar of red sandstone. It was known as Darling Rock, or, by older inhabitants, as Tom Paine’s Field. The effects of wind, rain and tides have eroded the pillar so that it is now a mound of sandstone hardly visible at high tide. Sheep once grazed on it when it was connected to the Cliff Field above the village.  

In 1792 the government ordered the public burning of the writings of the ‘notorious pamphleteer Tom Paine’ and, historical tradition has it that this was the site of the local burning.¹ 

On January 3, 1793, Trewman’s Exeter Flying Post² reported that on the previous Tuesday (January 1), ‘the loyal inhabitants of Exmouth  (about two miles south of Lympstone) and its environs assembled for  the purpose of hanging and burning Tom Paine. A handsome collection for that purpose having been previously made – about 12  o’clock the procession began, consisting of the trades-people of the  town, the farmers of the neighbourhood and sailors, two and two with  bands of music, banners flying etc., etc., and lastly an effigy of Tom  Paine in a cart, with the Rights of Man in one hand and a pair of stays in  the other. They paraded through every part of the town singing God  Save the King and receiving from the inhabitants every testimony of  loyalty to his Majesty, veneration for the constitution and detestation of  the principles of the miscreant they were about to burn. The procession  then went to the Point where they hung the effigy on a gibbet 50 feet high, then burnt it amid the acclamations of every individual present.’  

Robert Morrell³ has recorded three instances, one near  Nottingham, one at Titmarch and another at Thrapstone, both in  Northamptonshire, of similar hangings and burnings.  

It would appear that then, as now, the public can be easily inflamed  and persuaded, against their own good, that their enemies are those  whom the government of the day wish them to regard as such.  

There must be many other instances of similar happenings throughout England. Readers may like to explore local libraries and historical societies for such reports.  

References

1. Devonshire Association. Reports and Transactions. 88. 1956. p.110. 8 plates.  
2. Cann, I.G. & Bush, R.J.E. Extracts from Trewman’s Exeter Flying Post from 1763. Volt. pp.51-52.  
3. Morrell, R.W. ‘Burning Paine in Effigy. TPS Bulletin.

The post Tom Paine’s Field   appeared first on .

The impressions we have of fighting in the American War of Independence are largely gathered from romanticised films made in Hollywood. Indeed much of how we imagine events to have been in any particular historical period will be coloured by what we have seen in films. It could be taken even further and demonstrated that every-day life, this present historical period, is taken from files that are seen nightly in our homes.

However, the times of Thomas Paine are more remote and perspective often focuses more accurately on individuals and events. Paine knew the battlefields of the war and lust have been familiar with the death and suffering common to all such conflicts, the Continental Army was subject, as all armies were and are, to sickness as well as injury and the former disabled an average of 18% of the forces for the duration of the war. Several epidemics also scourged the army and severely decreased its fighting ability.

An article in the Tenth Anniversary of the Annals of Emergency Medicine draws together facts and impressions from the writings of the time, in particular, the Medical Inquiries and Observations, Volume 3, of Benjamin Rush, who knew Paine and with whom Paine had many discussions. (Annals of Emergency Medicine, 2.1.)

In civilian life major injuries (trauma is the modern term) were infrequent and when they occurred were usually the result of accidents with horses. There were no tall buildings, speed of travel was slow, machinery was primitive (the Industrial Revolution was only beginning), drunkeness, muggings, rape, armed robbery, the social signs of the present times, although they undoubtedly occurred they did not give rise to any appreciable load on medical or nursing services. Most illness and death was the result of disease rather than injury.

So it was the war that brought the heavy burden and toll of life and limb, liar brought the primary case-load of surgeons. But even then the injuries were the result of low-velocity, close quarter fighting weapons. Firearms and artillery were cumbersome and inaccurate and only unusually caused injury, Swords, bayonets, arrows and blunter weapons caused the majority of wounds. Occasionally overturning wagons and, less frequently, burning by fire, gave rise to injury, Indian arrows, tomahawks and scalping were also occasionally the cause of injury.

Hospitals as we know them had not developed; care of the injured was most often undertaken in private homes, barns and churches. Surgical treatment took place on the battlefield – and gave better results than surgery undertaken at a later stage.

It is recorded that men bore operations of every kind immediately after a battle with more fortitude than they did at any time thereafter. Probably the commonest operation was the amputation of a limb, undertaken for multiple fractures, infection and gangrene, and reputedly taking only twenty seconds to accomplish! This often led to the recovery of the patient, Other operations were for the removal of bullets, trepanning (trephining a hole in the skull) and the suturing of wounds. The setting of fractures was simple and crude.

Every doctor carried lancets for blood-letting, Pleurisy, for example, typically required the removal of twelve ounces of blood from the jugular vein.

The surgeons themselves (every British regiment had its own surgeon and the Americans soon followed), were not trained doctors; rather they were technicians trained to do certain jobs, and these they performed with skill and speed.

For a number of reasons medicines were in short supply. The medicines used relied on homeopathic and naturopathic principles for whatever efficacy they had. There were of course no anaesthetics although opium and its relative laudanum were available; mostly alcohol (as in American ‘westerns’) was the only anaesthetic, otherwise the soldier had to ‘bite the bullet’. Other medicines, often made or compounded in the field, were concerned with emesis, purgation or counter-irritation. Venereal disease, upon developing which a soldier would suffer a deduction from pay, was treated with spring water, sumac root, gunpowder and fresh milk. Snake bites were treated with olive oil and mercury ointment, while horse-radish and mustard seed in gin were the standby for kidney stones. Medicine chests thus might contain eighty or more such remedies.

The organisation of medical services was undertaken by the Hospital Department, a government agency set up on July 27, 1775, after the battle of Bunker Hill, It supervised all aspects of medical care and the person who controlled it achieved immense power, sometimes indeed abusing it. So much did this occur with the first four Directors that Congress intervened, taking overall command until a more suitable Director General could be found. The Hospital Department was the nearest thing to a system for the management of war casualties that existed during the Revolutionary War and the Director had the same task, and power, that a Managing Director of the National Health Service now has.

Hospitals as such were of three kinds. There were General Hospitals, established at first in homes, barns, churches, colleges and public buildings, but later in purpose-built large buildings which would be recognisable as hospitals today. Secondly there were Flying Hospitals – often tented or in huts, which followed the troops in the campaigns. By their nature they were fine-weather, spring and summer affairs. Thirdly, the regimental surgeon and his mates formed the Regimental hospital, closest to the men, carrying out all the immediate treatment and often saving lives on the battlefield, the compound where this took place usually contained twenty-five new or minor cases prior to evacuation, any soldiers dreaded admission to the more developed hospitals because of their reputation. “Hospitals are the sinks of human life in an army. They robbed the United States of more citizens than the sword”. (Rush, Benjamin, Medical Inquiries and Observations, Vol.1. Peterson, H.L., The Book of the Continental Soldier) Often men suffered in silence rather than complain and be admitted.

Ambulances were yet to be invented, by D.J. Larrey, a French surgeon, in 1790, some time after the end of the Revolutionary War, so that at this time transport to and between hospitals was hazardous. Half of the rounded would die on the way, partly of course from the effects of their injuries but mostly by the manner of their transportation. And when the injured arrived at the established hospitals the risks of succumbing were great. Dr. Rush himself estimated that a soldier going to the war had a 98% chance of survival (what soldier today has such a chance?). His chances were reduced to 75% when he found himself in hospital, ‘Humanity, economy and philosophy, all concur in giving preference to the convenience and wholesome air of private houses; and should war continue to be the absurd and unchristian mode of deciding national disputes, it is hoped that the progress of science will so far mitigate one of its greatest calamities, as to produce an abolition of hospitals for acute diseases’. 

In hospital, typhus, louse-borne, especially in winter, dysentery the so-called ‘hospital fever’, and sepsis spread like wild-fire, for this was a hundred years before ideas of contagion and infection were realised.

Over and above all the suffering and death there was the extraordinary camaraderie of war, in civilians and soldiers alike, a fact that society ought to explore, a camaraderie that is not so obvious in peace time.

The post Thomas Paine and the Care Of The Continental Army appeared first on .

IN PART 1 OF THE AGE OF REASON, written during the French Revolution and completed we are told only a matter of hours before his arrest, Paine devotes some pages to a general account of astronomy as an introduction on Christian theology. It is worth looking at this accountto in the light of knowledge as it was then and as it is now, and also to consider sources of Paine’s information. 

He begins with a comment on the ‘plurality of worlds’, an idea from the ancient philosophers gaining acceptance in scientific circles in the eighteenth century largely by virtue of the work of Halley and Herschell, indicating the vastness of space and the lack of uniqueness in the existence of the Earth. 

He then describes the Solar system — the sun and its six satellites or worlds, all in annual motion around the sun, some satellites having their own satellites or moons in attendance, each world keeping its own track (the ecliptic) around the sun. Each world spins around itself (rotates on its own axis) and this causes day and night. Most worlds, in their self-rotation, are tilted against their line of movement around the Sun (the obliquity of the ecliptic) and Paine quotes the correct figure for Earth of 212 degrees. It is this tilt that is responsible for the changing seasons and for the variation in the length of day and night—time over the world and throughout the seasons. Earth makes 365 rotations in one year’s orbit of the Sun. 

The six planets are then described with their distances from the Sun. These figures are incorrect now, but the figure he gives for Earth’s distance, 88 million miles, agrees with the eighteenth century figure derived from Kepler’s Laws of about 1620. In 1772, Bode formulated his empirical law of planetary distances giving the measurements more accurately than hitherto, but this information would not have permeated the circles in which Paine moved after his departure for America. 

As proof that it is possible for man to know these distances he cites the fact that for centuries the precise date and time of eclipses and also the passage of a planet like Venus across the face of the Sun (a transit) have been calculated and forecast. 

Beyond the Solar system, ‘far beyond all power of calculation’ (until Besse’ calculated the distance of 61 Cygni in 1838) are the “fixed” stars, and these fixed stars ‘continue always at the same distance from each other, and always in the same place, as does the Sun in the centre Of the system’. William Herschell communicated to the Royal Society in 1783 that this was not in fact so, and that all stars were moving but at rates indiscernible as yet to man. Paine repeats a current idea that these ‘fixed’ stars or suns probably all have their own planets in attendance upon them. Thus the immensity of space. 

‘All our knowledge of science is derived from the revolutions those several planets or worlds of which our system is composed to make in their circuit round the Sun’. He regards this multiplicity as a benefit bestowed by the Creator — otherwise, all that matter in one globe with no revolutionary motion (there are echoes of Newton here) would have deprived our senses and our scientific knowledge, — ‘it is from the sciences that all the mechanical arts that contribute so much to our earthly felicity and comfort are derived’. He even suggests that the devotional gratitude of man is due to the Creator for this plurality.

The same opportunities of knowledge are available to the inhabitants of neighbouring planets and to the inhabitants of planets of other suns in the universe. The idea of a society of worlds Paine finds cheerful – a happy contrivance of the almighty for the instruction of mankind. What then of the Christian faith and the ‘solitary and strange conceit that the Almighty, with millions of worlds equally dependent on his protection, should devote all his care to this world and come to die in it’? ‘Has every world an Eve, an apple, a serpent and a redeemer?’ And so to the rest of The Age of Reason. 

Where did Paine obtain his astronomical information and instruction? It is unlikely he had any books with him, he certainly did not have a bible. Paris, seething with the Revolution, had Astronomer Bailly as mayor until his execution in 1793. Condorcet (author of Progress of the Human Spirit) and Lavoisier (the’father of modern chemistri9 were deeply involved and died in the Revolution. Laplace (‘the French Newton’) and astronomer Lalande were also in and around Paris at this time. But all these scientists, like Paine, would have been too busy to teach or discuss astronomy. So Paine would have had to recall the lectures and practical demonstrations he attended in London before he went to America. They were given by Benjamin Martin, James Ferguson, and Dr. John Bevis. It is worthwhile looking at the careers of these three men, mentioned only by surname early in The Age of Reason, because the facts, derived from the Dictionary of National Biography, afford some light on Paine’s life in London. 

Benjamin MARTIN (1704-1782) – A ploughboy to begin with, he began to teach the ‘three Rs’ at Guildford while studying to become a mathematician, instrument maker, and general compiler of information. He read Newton’s Opticks (1705) and became an ardent follower of his ideas. He used a £500 legacy to buy instruments and books in order to become an itinerant lecturer. He had over 30 major publications to his name as well as a number of inventions. He perfected the Orrery (not named after its inventor, as Paine states, but after the patron of the copier of the invention), and used his own version in his lectures. He lived in London, at Hadley’s Quadrant in Fleet Street, from 1740 onwards. He died following attempted suicide in 1782. 

James FERGUSON (1710-1776) – A shepherd-boy in Banffshire at the age of ten. He took up medicine at Edinburgh but gave up to sketch embroidery patterns and then to paint portraits and continue his interest in astronomy. He used the income from his painting to enable him to begin as a teacher and lecturer in London in 1748, where he had arrived five years before. His book, Astronomy explained on Sir Isaac Newton’s Principles (1756), went to at least thirteen editions and was used by William Herschell for his own study of astronomy. George III called on Ferguson for tuition in mechanics, and he was made a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1763. He became a busy lecturer in and around London in the middle of the eighteenth-century, sometimes also travelling to Newcastle, Derby, Bath and Bristol for speaking engagements. He occasionally had public disagreements with his wife – even in the middle of lectures! 

Dr. John BEVIS (1693-1771) – He studied medicine at Oxford and travelled widely in France and Italy before settling in London prior to 1730. Newton’s Opticks was his favourite reading matter, and in 1738 he gave up his practice and moved out to Stoke Newington where he built his own observatory. Here, and at Greenwich, assisting Edmund Halley (who died in 1742) he did much astronomical work, and made a unique star-atlas, the Uranographia Brittanica, the plates of which, however, were sequestered in chancery when the printer, John Neale, became bankrupt, and earned quite a reputation (internationally) as an astronomer. When Maskelyne became Astronomer Royal following the death of Bliss in 1764, Bevis, who had hoped for the appointment himself, returned to his medical practice, setting up at the Temple. He was made a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1765. But astronomy got him in the end, for, continuing his studies, he was turning quickly from his telescope one day when he fell, sustaining injuries from which he died. It could only have been at this period of his life, at the Temple, as a F.R.S., that Paine knew him. ‘As soon as I was able I purchased a pair of globes, and attended the philosophical lectures of Martin and Ferguson, and afterward acquainted with Dr. Bevis of the society called the Royal Society, then living in the Temple, and an excellent astronomer’. 

Moncure Conway in his Life of Paine mentions that Rickman assigns the period of instruction in astronomy to the year 1767, but that he himself preferred the earlier time of 1757, when Paine would have been 20 years of age. Moreover, he suggests that Paine would have been too poor to afford globes in 1766-7. A study of the lives of his mentors shows clearly that he met Martin and Ferguson fairly certainly at the earlier time, but Dr. Bevis only at the later period, having bought his globes, terrestrial and celestial, ten years previously. On the first occasion he was a staymaker with Mr. Morris of Hanover Street; on the second he was teaching at Mr. Goodman’s and then in Kensington. 

There were some important events taking place in astronomy at this time but they seem to have escaped Paine’s notice. William Herschell discovered the seventh, telescopic, planet in 1781. He wanted to call it ‘George’s Star’, but it is now called Uranus. The scientists in Paris would have known all about this important discovery but one supposes that there would have been no occasion to discuss it with Paine; in any case he did not speak French fluently. There had been transits of Venus across the Sun in 1761 and 1769 (the only occasions that century) and Paine mentions them in a footnote to prove how man can know sufficient to predict these and similar events. They must have been occasions of much general public comment — especially when scientists were trying to calculate accurately the distance of the Sun from Earth at these events. And then in 1789, Herschell made his great 40 foot telescope, the envy of astronomers everywhere, indeed, the National Assembly were later to promote a prize for such an undertaking. However, time, scarcity of the necessary metals, and the shortage of money prevented any such project succeeding in stricken France. 

Thomas Paine had minimal experience at the eyepiece of a telescope and he showed no inclination later in his life to pursue astronomical studies. But in these brief pages of The Age of Reason he shows he had gained a very clear understanding of the Solar system from those early days in London. 

10, Stevenstone Road, Exmouth, Devon, EX8 2EP.

The post Thomas Paine’s Astronomy appeared first on .

In 1805, Thomas Paine addressed a tract to the Board of Health of the United States entitled “Of the Cause of the Yellow Fever; And the Means of Preventing it” in places not yet effected with it. In 1807, Clio Rickman printed and published this tract in London, at Upper Mary-le-bone Street, with a foreword to the reader: 

“I publish the following little tract of Thomas Paine’s in England, hoping that it may benefit society, by throwing some light on certain local diseases, even in countries, where it does not so particularly apply, as in America. 

“I know also it will gratify many, to have anything from his pen; and to hear that the Author, though above Seventy, possesses health, fortune, and happiness; and that he is held in the highest estimation amongst the most exalted and best characters in America – That America, which is indebted for almost every blessing she knows to His labours and exertions.” 

Present-day knowledge

AMARYL, or Yellow Fever, also called Yellow Jack because ships carrying crew or passengers with the disease flew a yellow flag, is a disease of Human Beings and some small animals, caused by a virus which is conveyed to man by the bite of a domestic mosquito, Aedes aegypti. 

It was first identified in Barbados in 1647, and is thought to have been taken across the Atlantic in slave ships. It was first described in English by a physician, Hughes, in 1715. There were devastating epidemics in North America in the 18th. century, especially one in Philadelphia in 1793. There was even a small outbreak in the United Kingdom in 1865, in Swansea. 

An attack of the disease, fatal in one in ten, confers. long-lasting immunity, and in areas where the disease is endemic the native population has considerable immunity. 

Viruses as a group of disease carrying agents were not discovered until 1887, and it was not until 1929 that the Yellow Fever virus was identified, although the mosquito Aedes aegypti had been inculpated in 1901. 

Yellow Fever has killed more investigating scientists than any other disease. It is said that the stories of the Flying Dutchman and of the Ancient Mariner are based on a ghost ship abandoned as the crew succumbed to Yellow Fever. 

The historical setting for Paine’s tract is interesting. Philadelphia, ‘as has already been mentioned, was the centre of a serious epedemic in 1793, just about the time that the negro slaves in Haiti began to revolt against their French owners. But it was not until 1801 that Toussaint L’Ouverture was finally victorious in gaining independence. By 1803 Napoleon Bonaparte had become jealous of this ‘Black Napoleon’ and formed a large armada in French, Spanish and Dutch ports under his brother-in-law, General Charles Leclerc, to sail to the West Indies and subdue the Haitians. However, the Haitians retreated to the mountains and the Yellow Fever destroyed two thirds of the French army, and although the French treacherously managed to abduct Toussaint to France, where he died the following year, Haiti kept its independence. Partly because of this bother, Napoleon sold Louisiana to America for fifteen million dollars in 1803. 

Yellow Fever was to play its part in defeating other European projects in the New World. In 1882, Ferdinand de Lesseps, hoping to repeat his Suez triumph, expended large amounts of shareholders’ money in machinery, labour and bribes, in an attempt to link the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans at Panama. By 1889, however, the mosquito carrying Yellow Fever and Malaria had defeated him, and ruined his company. 

It is apparent that Thomas Paine, who died in 1809, was not to know the scientific facts nor historical effects of Yellow Fever which are now commonly appreciated, and it is therefore interesting to read again his paper on its cause. It runs to more than 2,500 words, but about a quarter is taken up with an interesting discussion and description of experiments with marsh gas. 

Marsh gas (“Fire-damp”) methane in its pure form, or, as we now know it, natural gas, and draw upon it from the North Sea, has been known for some centuries. Decomposition of organic matter at the bottom of rivers and ponds produces large amounts of impure and often highly inflammable air, and this can be set free by accident or by stirring the mud or exposing it to dry out. 

Paine recounts an extraordinary episode in the autumn of 1783 when, Washington having withdrawn from New York and made his Headquarters at Mrs.Berrians, Rocky Hill, Jersey, it came to their knowledge that the creek under Rocky Hill had a fiery reputation it was said that it could be set alight. Washington knew of this and was interested enough to allow Paine to persuade him to try it. So, on the evening of November the fifth (a pleasant coincidence for the English fire-raiser), with General Lincoln, two aides- de-camp, some soldiers with poles, Washington at one end and Thomas Paine at the other, a scow sailed over the mill-pond on the creek, While the soldiers stirred the bottom of the pond, Washington and Paine held rolls of lighted cartridge paper over the surface of the water. Then, in a style that would please his amateur scientist friends, Priestley and Jefferson, Paine describes and proves that it was gas that was set alight by the illustrious and future President. 

As regards Yellow Fever, Paine notes that it begins and continues in the lowest parts of populous marine towns near the water, especially around wharves. He makes the digression to discuss marsh gas, not because he feels that it is the cause of Yellow Fever, but he puts forward the idea that the gas is injurious to life, especially if it combines with a ‘miasm’ from the low ground newly produced when wharves are built, and that this pernicious vapour from submerged material is responsible for the disease.. 

Because he believes that it is wharf-making that contributes, if it does not actually cause, to fellow Fever, he ends the paper by suggesting new ways of making wharves lengthways along the river banks, and of iron rather than stone to make them cheaper, and that old wharves can be opened up so that the tide can wash in and around the banks of new earth disposing of any injurious vapours. 

Finally: “In taking up and treating this subject, I have considered it as belonging to Natural Philosophy, rather than medicinal art; and therefore say nothing about treatment of the disease, after it takes place; I leave that part to those whose profession it is to study it.” 

Although there is now a very reliable vaccine to prevent Yellow Fever, there is still no treatment except good general nursing. 

The cause we know to be a virus carried in the saliva of a mosquito, and it is only by stringent international regulations that Yellow Fever is confined to a belt roughly 150 North and South of the Equator. 

Thomas Paine’s comments about the disease occurring only where the banks are broken out and flattened to form wharves are entirely in keeping with the facts as we know them, for it is just in these areas that the mosquito finds the type of stagnant water it needs to breed. It is interesting that he uses much the same phrase in describing the site of the occurrence of Yellow Fever as does Sir Patrick Manson in his famous textbook on tropical diseases (6th. edition, 1919) – “The ideal haunt of Yellow Fever is the low-lying, hot, squalid, insanitary district in the neighbourhood of the wharves and docks of large sea-port towns…..a ‘place’ disease.” 

Paine makes a point that the inhabitants of the West Indies and the Indians of America before the arrival of the white man, did not suffer from Yellow Fever, otherwise they would have forsaken the areas. This is quite true for the native population possessing ‘herd’ immunity, developed over the centuries. 

In the Twentieth century, the disease would be prevented from arriving in the States by adequate vaccination and strict control of travellers. And the accumulation of pools of stagnant water close to dwellings and ships would likewise be prevented, or at least sprayed with mosquito killing chemicals. 

The style in which this tract is written, Paine’s accumulation of facts, and his derivation from these of reasonable hypotheses, are entirely in the manner of the good natural scientist of his age.

The post Thomas Paine On Yellow Fever  appeared first on .