For a history of the uncommonly cold and tempestuous winter of 1804 and 1805, the reader is referred to the Account of the Climate of Pennsylvania, in the first volume of these Inquiries and Observations.
During the months of January, February, and March, there were a number of bilious catarrhs and pleurisies.
On the 7th of April, I visited a patient in the yellow fever with Dr. Stewart. He was cured, chiefly by copious bleeding.
The weather was rainy in May. After the middle of June, and during the whole month of July, there fell no rain. The mercury in Fahrenheit fluctuated, for ten days, between 90° and 94°, during this month. The diseases which occurred in it were cholera infantum, dysenteries, a few common bilious, and eight cases of yellow fever. Three of the last were in Twelfth, between Locust and Walnut-streets, and were first visited, on the 14th and 15th of the month, by Dr. Hartshorn, as out-patients of the Pennsylvania hospital. Two of them were attended, about a week afterwards, by Dr. Church, in Southwark, and the remaining three by Dr. Rouisseau and Dr. Stewart, in the south end of the city.
On the third of August, there fell a heavy shower of rain, but the weather, during the remaining part of the month, was warm and dry. The pastures were burnt up, and there was a great deficiency of summer vegetables in the neighbourhood of Philadelphia. The water in the Schuylkill was lower by three inches than it had been in the memory of a man of 70 years of age, who had lived constantly within sight of it.
In September, a number of cases of yellow fever appeared in Southwark[9], near Catharine-street. They were readily traced to a large bed of oysters, which had putrified on Catharine-street wharf, and which had emitted a most offensive exhalation throughout the whole neighbourhood, for several weeks before the fever made its appearance. This exhalation proved fatal to a number of cats and dogs, and it now became obvious that the two cases of yellow fever, that were attended by Dr. Church, in the month of July, were derived from it. An attempt was made to impose a belief that they were taken by contagion from a ship at the lazaretto, which had lately arrived from the West-Indies, but a careful investigation of this tale proved, that neither of the two subjects of the fever had been on board that, nor any other ship, then under quarantine.
The fever prevailed during the whole of this month in Southwark. A few cases of it appeared in the city, most of which were in persons who had resided in, or visited that district. It was brought on by weak exciting causes in Southwark, but the cases which originated in the city, required strong exciting causes to produce them.
A heavy rain, accompanied with a good deal of wind, on the 28th of September, and a frost on the night of the 7th of October, gave a considerable check to the fever.