those works under the
erroneous impression, that the Appendix for students contained the
substance of that paper; whereas it does so only in the sense that the
four first rules contain the substance of the arithmetic. No wonder your
intelligent correspondent should not find, in the Appendix of the
Report, the information he was seeking, and hence the questions he asks
you to refer to me for solution. I herewith beg leave to send you a copy
of the "_Report on the diseases and physical peculiarities of the Negro
race_," which the Louisiana physicians appointed me to make to the State
Medical Society. In that paper your correspondent will find most of the
questions he asks already answered.

I thank you for the opportunity thus afforded me of supplying an
omission in the Southern works above alluded to, of a paper, very
imperfect and defective, it is true, yet embodying in a small space the
results of the experience and observation of a Southern practitioner,
extending through a period of active service of a third of a century's
duration, and which had the honor to meet with the approbation of the
physicians generally of the South. To the few questions not answered
therein I propose to reply, and at the same time to extend my remarks on
that branch of the subject more directly connected with the particular
object of your correspondent's investigations.

To the question, "Is not Phthisis very common among the slaves of the
slave States and unknown among the native Africans at home?" I reply in
the negative, that Phthisis, so far from being common among the slaves
of the slave States, is very seldom met with. As to the native Africans
at home, little or nothing is known of their diseases. They have no
science or literature among them, and never had. The word Consumption,
is applied to two very different diseases among negroes. The Cachexia
Africana, Dirt-eating of the English, and Mal d'Estomac of the French,
commonly called Negro Consumption, is a very different malady from
Phthisis Pulmonalis, properly so called. The Cachexia Africana, like
other spanoemic states of the system, may run into Phthisis, or become
complicated with it. Dr. Hall asks, in what does the peculiarity of
Negro Consumption consist? It consists in being an anoematosis and not a
tuberculosis. Not having seen my Report, he may have inferred that it
was a tubercular disease--whereas it is an erythism of mind connected
with spanoemia. Negroes, however, a