The subjects which furnished the materials for this history were not only private patients, but the poor in the city hospital, who were committed to the care of Dr. Physick and myself, by the board of health.
I. The pulse was, in many cases, less active in the beginning of this fever than in former years. It was seldom preternaturally slow. It resembled the pulse which occurs in the first stage of the common jail fever. Hæmorrhages were common about the fourth and fifth days, and generally from the gums, throat, or stomach.
II. The whole alimentary canal was much affected in most cases. Costiveness and a vomiting were general. The alvine discharges were occasionally green, dark-coloured, black, and natural. The black vomiting was more common this year than in former years, in all the forms of the fever. It was sometimes suspended for several days before death, and hopes were entertained of a recovery of patients in whom it had appeared. In a boy, at the city hospital, it ceased ten days before he died. It was sometimes succeeded by delirium or coma, but it more commonly left the patient free of pain, and in the possession of all the faculties of his mind.
III. The tongue was by no means an index of the state of the fever, as in the years 1793 and 1797. I saw several deaths, attended with a black vomiting, in which the tongue retained a natural appearance. This phenomenon at first deceived me. I ascribed it to such a concentration of the disease in the stomach and other vital parts, as to prevent its diffusing itself through the external parts of the system. We observe the effects of the same cause in a natural state of the skin, and in a natural appearance of the urine, in the most malignant forms of this fever.
IV. In the nervous system, the disease appeared with several new symptoms. A relation of Peter Field attempted to bite his attendants in the delirium of his fever, just before he died.
I attended a young woman at Mrs. Easby's, who started every time I touched her pulse. Loud talking, or a question suddenly proposed to her, produced the same convulsive motion. She retained her reason during the whole of her illness, and was cured by bleeding and a salivation.
Hiccup was a common symptom. I saw but two patients recover who had it. In one of them, Dr. Hedges, it came on after the sixth day of the fever, and continued, without any other symptom of disease, for four or five days.
I lost a patient who complained of no pain but in the calves of his legs. Dr. Physick lost a girl, in the city hospital, who complained only of pains in her toes. Her stomach discovered, after death, strong marks of inflammation.
Many people passed through every stage of the disease, without uttering a complaint of pain of any kind.
An uncommon stiffness in the limbs preceded death a few hours, in several cases. This stiffness ceased, in one of Dr. Physick's patients, immediately after death, but returned as soon as he became cold.