4. There was a general disposition to sweat in this fever from its beginning. Two of my patients died, in whom no moisture could be excited on the skin. But I recovered one with a dry skin, by means of a purge, two bleedings, and blisters.
An efflorescence on the skin occurred in several instances. I saw black matter discharged from a blister in one case, and blood in another.
5. The stools were green and black. Bile was generally discharged in puking.
6. The blood exhibited the following appearances: siziness, lotura carnium, sunken crassamentum, red sediment, and what is called dense or unseparated blood. I saw no instance of its being dissolved.
7. The tongue was whitish and dark-coloured. This diseased appearance continued, in some instances, several days after a recovery took place. I saw no smooth, red, nor black tongue, and but one dry and one natural tongue. The latter was followed by death.
I did not see a single case in which the disease came on without an exciting cause; such as light clothing and bed-clothes, sitting at doors after night, a long walk, gunning, and violent and unusual exercises of any kind. It was excited in a number of people by their exertions to extinguish a fire which took place in Water-street, between Market and Chesnut-streets, on the morning of the 25th of August. I saw a fatal instance of it succeed a severe tooth-ach. Whether this pain was the exciting cause, or the first morbid symptom of the fever, I know not; but I was led by it to bleed a young lady twice who complained of that pain, and who had at the same time a tense pulse. Her blood had the usual appearances which occur in the yellow fever.
The disease had different appearances in different parts of the city. It was most malignant in Water-street; but in many instances it became less so, as it travelled westward, so that about Ninth-street it appeared in the form of a common intermittent.
In every part of the city it often came on, as in the year 1802, in all the milder forms of autumnal fever formerly enumerated, and went off with the usual symptoms of yellow fever. Again, it came on with all the force and malignity of a yellow fever, and terminated, in a day or two, in a common remittent or intermittent. These modes of attack were so common, that it was impossible to tell what the character, or probable issue of a fever would be, for two or three days.
The following remedies were found, very generally, to be effectual in this fever.