On the 19th of this month I was requested to visit the wife of Mr. Peter Le Maigre, in Water-street, between Arch and Race-streets, in consultation with Dr. Foulke and Dr. Hodge. I found her in the last stage of a highly bilious fever. She vomited constantly, and complained of great heat and burning in her stomach. The most powerful cordials and tonics were prescribed, but to no purpose. She died on the evening of the next day.
Upon coming out of Mrs. Le Maigre's room I remarked to Dr. Foulke and Dr. Hodge, that I had seen an unusual number of bilious fevers, accompanied with symptoms of uncommon malignity, and that I suspected all was not right in our city. Dr. Hodge immediately replied, that a fever of a most malignant kind had carried off four or five persons within sight of Mr. Le Maigre's door, and that one of them had died in twelve hours after the attack of the disease. This information satisfied me that my apprehensions were well founded. The origin of this fever was discovered to me at the same time, from the account which Dr. Foulke gave me of a quantity of damaged coffee which had been thrown upon Mr. Ball's wharf, and in the adjoining dock, on the 24th of July, nearly in a line with Mr. Le Maigre's house, and which had putrefied there to the great annoyance of the whole neighbourhood.
After this consultation I was soon able to trace all the cases of fever which I have mentioned to this source. Dr. Hodge lived a few doors above Mr. Le Maigre's, where his child had been exposed to the exhalation from the coffee for several days. Mrs. Bradford had spent an afternoon in a house directly opposite to the wharf and dock on which the putrid coffee had emitted its noxious effluvia, a few days before her sickness, and had been much incommoded by it. Her sister, Mrs. Leaming, had visited her during her illness at her house, which was about two hundred yards from the infected wharf. Young Mr. M'Nair and Mrs. Palmer's two sons had spent whole days in a compting house near where the coffee was exposed, and each of them had complained of having been made sick by its offensive smell, and Mr. Aston had frequently been in Water-street near the source of the exhalation.
This discovery of the malignity, extent, and origin of a fever which I knew to be attended with great danger and mortality, gave me great pain. I did not hesitate to name it the bilious remitting yellow fever. I had once seen it epidemic in Philadelphia, in the year 1762. Its symptoms were among the first impressions which diseases made upon my mind. I had recorded some of these symptoms, as well as its mortality. I shall here introduce a short account of it, from a note book which I kept during my apprenticeship.
“In the year 1762, in the months of August, September, October, November, and December, the bilious yellow fever prevailed in Philadelphia, after a very hot summer, and spread like a plague, carrying off daily, for some time, upwards of twenty persons.
“The patients were generally seized with rigours, which were succeeded with a violent fever, and pains in the head and back. The pulse was full, and sometimes irregular. The eyes were inflamed, and had a yellowish cast, and a vomiting almost always attended.
“The 3d, 5th, and 7th days were mostly critical, and the disease generally terminated on one of them, in life or death.
“An eruption on the 3d or 7th day over the body proved salutary.
“An excessive heat and burning about the region of the liver, with cold extremities, portended death to be at hand.”