7thly and lastly. A change, favourable to successful practice in Philadelphia, has taken place in the conduct of physicians to their patients. A sick room has ceased to be the theatre of imposture in dress and manners, and prescriptions are no longer delivered with the pomp and authority of edicts. On the contrary, sick people are now instructed in the nature of their diseases, and informed of the names and design of their medicines, by which means faith and reason are made to co-operate in adding efficacy to them. Nor are patients left, as formerly, by their physicians, under the usual appearances of dissolution, without the aid of medicine. By thus disputing every inch of ground with death, many persons have been rescued from the grave, and lived, years afterwards, monuments of the power of the healing art.
From a review of what has been effected within the last nine and thirty years, in lessening the mortality of many diseases, we are led to look forward with confidence and pleasure to the future achievements of our science.
Could we lift the curtain of time which separates the year 1843 from our view, we should see cancers, pulmonary consumptions, apoplexies, palsies, epilepsy, and hydrophobia struck out of the list of mortal diseases, and many others which still retain an occasional power over life, rendered perfectly harmless, provided the same number of discoveries and improvements shall be made in medicine in the intermediate years, that have been made since the year 1766.
But in vain will the avenues of death from those diseases be closed, while the more deadly yellow fever is permitted to supply their place, and to spread terror, distress, and poverty through the city, by destroying the lives of her citizens by hundreds or thousands every year. Dear cradle of liberty of conscience in the western world! nurse of industry and arts! and patron of pious and benevolent institutions! may this cease to be thy melancholy destiny! May Heaven dispel the errors and prejudices of thy citizens upon the cause and means of preventing their pestilential calamities! and may thy prosperity and happiness be revived, extended, and perpetuated for ages yet to come!
Footnotes:
[66] From the early knowledge this excellent physician and worthy man had thus acquired of the bilious remitting fever, he was very successful in the treatment of it. It was by instruction conveyed by him to me with peculiar delicacy, that I was first taught the advantages of copious evacuations from the bowels in that disease. I had been called, when a young practitioner, to visit a gentleman with him in a bilious pleurisy. A third or fourth bleeding, which I advised, cured him. The doctor was much pleased with its effect, and said to me afterwards, “Doctor, you and I have each a great fault in our practice; I do not bleed enough, you do not purge enough.”
[67] It appears, from the account given by Mr. White of the bilious fever of Bath, that it prevailed several years in its suburbs, before it became general in that city. It is remarkable, that Southwark was nearly the exclusive seat, not only of the bilious or break-bone fever of 1780, but of the intermitting fever in 1765, taken notice of by Dr. Bond, and of the yellow fever of 1805.
[68] The late Mr. Andrew Spence was the first regular bred dentist that settled in Philadelphia. There are now several well educated gentlemen in the city of that profession.