The next day this excellent woman sickened, and died on the 19th of the same month.
If in a person possessed naturally of uncommon equanimity and fortitude, the distresses of our city produced such dejection of spirits, what must have been their effect upon hundreds, who were not endowed with those rare and extraordinary qualities of mind! Death in this, as well as in many other cases in which medicine had done its duty, appeared to be the inevitable consequence of the total abstraction of the energy of the mind in restoring the natural motions of life.
Under all the circumstances which have been mentioned, which opposed the system of depletion in the cure of this fever, it was still far more successful than any other mode of cure that had been pursued before in the United States, or in the West-Indies.
Three out of four died of the disease in Jamaica, under the care of Dr. Hume.
Dr. Blane considers it as one of the “most mortal” of diseases, and Dr. Jackson places a more successful mode of treating it among the subjects which will admit of “innovation” in medicine.
After the 15th of September, my success was much limited, compared with what it had been before that time. But at no period of the disease did I lose more than one in twenty of those whom I saw on the first day, and attended regularly through every stage of the fever, provided they had not been previously worn down by attending the sick.
The following statement, which will admit of being corrected, if it be inaccurate, will, I hope, establish the truth of the above assertions.
About one half of the families whom I have attended for many years, left the city. Of those who remained, many were affected by the disease. Out of the whole of them, after I had adopted my second mode of practice, I lost but five heads of families, and about a dozen servants and children. In no instance did I lose both heads of the same family. My success in these cases was owing to two causes: 1st, To the credit my former patients gave to my public declaration, that we had only one fever in the city: hence they applied on the first day, and sometimes on the first hour of their indisposition; and 2dly, To the numerous pledges many of them had seen of the safety and efficacy of copious blood-letting, by my advice, in other diseases: hence my prescription of that necessary remedy was always obeyed in its utmost extent. Of the few adults whom I lost, among my former patients, two of them were old people, two took laudanum, without my knowledge, and one refused to take medicine of any kind; all the rest had been worn down by previous fatigue.
I have before said that a great number of the blacks were my patients. Of these not one died under my care. This uniform success, among those people, was not owing altogether to the mildness of the disease, for I shall say presently, that a great proportion of a given number died, under other modes of practice.