On the 25th of the month, two members of a committee, lately appointed by the government of the state, for taking care of the health of the city, called upon me to know whether the yellow fever was in town. I told them it was, and mentioned some of the cases that had come under my notice; but informed them, at the same time, that I had seen no case in which it had been contagious, and that, in every case where I had been called early, and where my prescriptions had been followed, the disease had yielded to medicine.
On the 29th of the month I received an invitation to attend a meeting of the committee of health, at their office at Walnut-street. They interrogated me respecting the intelligence I had given to two of their members on the 25th. I repeated it to them, and mentioned the names of all the persons I had attended in the yellow fever since the 9th of June.
Neither this, nor several subsequent communications to the committee of health produced the effect that was intended by them. Dr. Physick and Dr. Dewees supported me in my declaration, but their testimony did not protect me from the clamours of my fellow-citizens, nor from the calumnies of some of my brethren, who, while they daily attended or lost patients in the yellow fever, called it by the less unpopular names of
1. A common intermittent. 2. A bilious fever. 3. An inflammatory remitting fever. 4. A putrid fever. 5. A nervous fever. 6. A dropsy of the brain. 7. A lethargy. 8. Pleurisy. 9. Gout. 10. Rheumatism. 11. Colic. 12. Dysentery. And 13. Sore throat.
It was said further, by several of the physicians of the city, not to be the yellow fever, because some who had died of it had not a sighing in the beginning, and a black vomiting in the close of the disease. Even where the black vomiting and yellow skin occurred, they were said not to constitute a yellow fever, for that those symptoms occurred in other fevers.
Let not the reader complain of the citizens and physicians of Philadelphia alone. A similar conduct has existed in all cities upon the appearance of great and mortal epidemics.
Nor is it any thing new for mortal diseases to receive mild and harmless names from physicians. The plague was called a spotted fever, for several months, by some of the physicians of London, in the year 1665.
Notwithstanding the pains which were taken to discredit the report of the existence of the yellow fever in the city, it was finally believed by many citizens, and a number of families in consequence of it left the city. And in spite of the harmless names of intermitting and remitting fever, and the like, which were given to the disease, the bodies of persons who had died with it were conveyed to the grave, in several instances, upon a hearse, the way in which those who died of the yellow fever were buried the year before.
From the influence of occasional showers of rain, in the months of September and October, the disease was frequently checked, so as to disappear altogether for two or three days in my circle of practice. It was observed, that while showers of rain lessened, moist or damp weather, without rain, increased it.