The weather in July was alternately hot, moderate, and cool, with but little rain. The first two weeks of this month were healthy. A few tertian fevers occurred, which readily yielded to bark, without previous bleeding. Between the 25th and 31st of the month, three deaths took place from the yellow fever.
In the month of August, the weather was the same as in July, except that there fell more rain in it. Mild remittents and cholera infantum were now common. There were likewise several cases of yellow fever during this month. One of them was in Fromberger's-court. It was induced by the fœtor of putrid fish in a cellar. A malignant dysentery was epidemic during this month in the upper part of Germantown, and in its neighbourhood. Several persons, Dr. Bensell informed me, died of it in thirty hours sickness. It prevailed, at the same time, in many parts of the New-England states.
In September, cases of yellow fever appeared in different parts of the city, but chiefly in Water, near Walnut-street. On the 12th of the month, the board of health published a declaration of its existence in the city, but said it was not contagious. This opinion gave great offence, for it was generally said to have been imported by means of a packet-boat from New-York, where the fever then prevailed, because a man had sickened and died in the neighbourhood of the wharf where this packet was moored. It was to no purpose to oppose to this belief, proofs that no sick person, and no goods supposed to be infected, had arrived in this boat, and that no one of three men, who had received the seeds of the disease in New-York, had communicated it to any one of the families in Philadelphia, in which they had sickened and died.
The disease assumed a new character this year, and was cured by a different force of medicine from that which was employed in some of the years in which it had prevailed in Philadelphia.
I shall briefly describe it in each of the systems, and then take notice of some peculiarities which attended it. Afterwards I shall mention the remedies which were effectual in curing it.
1. The pulse was moderately tense in most cases. It intermitted in one case, and in several others the tension was of a transient nature.
Hæmorrhages occurred in many cases. They were chiefly from the nose, but in some instances they occurred from the stomach, bowels, and hæmorrhoidal vessels.
2. Great flatulency attended in the stomach, but sickness and vomiting were much less frequent than in former years. I saw but one case in which diarrhœa attended this fever.
3. I did not meet with a single instance of a glandular swelling in any part of the body.