Many were affected with pains in the breast and sides. A difficulty of breathing attended in some, and a cough was universal. Sometimes this cough alternated with a pain in the head. Sometimes it preceded this pain, and sometimes it followed it. It was at all times distressing. In some instances, it resembled the chin-cough. One person expired in a fit of coughing, and many persons spat blood in consequence of its violence. I saw several patients in whom the disease affected the trachea chiefly, producing great difficulty of breathing, and, in one case, a suppression of the voice, and I heard of another in which the disease, by falling on the trachea, produced a cynanche trachealis. In most of the cases which terminated fatally, the patients died of pneumonia notha.
The stomach was sometimes affected by nausea and vomiting; but this was far from being a universal symptom.
I met with four cases in which the whole force of the disease fell upon the bowels, and went off in a diarrhœa; but in general the bowels were regular or costive.
The limbs were affected with such acute pains as to be mistaken for the rheumatism, or for the break-bone-fever of 1780. The pains were most acute in the back and thighs.
Profuse sweats appeared in many over the whole body in the beginning, but without affording any relief. It was in some instances accompanied by erysipelatous, and in four cases which came to my knowledge, it was followed by miliary eruptions.
The pulse was sometimes tense and quick, but seldom full. In a great majority of those whom I visited it was quick, weak, and soft.
There was no appearance in the urine different from what is common in all fevers.
The disease had evident remissions, and the fever seldom continued above three or four days; but the cough, and some other troublesome symptoms, sometimes continued two or three weeks.
In a few persons, the fever terminated in a tedious and dangerous typhus.