The city of Philadelphia, with all its native and acquired advantages, at last got an unenviable distinction, toward the close of the last century, as a plague-spot. As in all such capitals, increasing almost too rapidly, the population crowded together in limited space; and the dissolute and the very poor, as those classes always do under similar circumstances, began to be a detriment to the health of the city. Sluggish drainage and indifferent water-supply did their fell work. Nearly half of the children born in the city died under two years of age, with stomach or bowel complaints. At last, in 1793, the yellow fever, which had not visited the city for thirty-one years, reappeared, and carried off 4000 inhabitants in the course of about three months.
And with the yellow fever came the doctors, of course; who, amongst themselves, roused one of those curious disputes for which the history of medical science is somewhat famous. A yellow-fever literature sprang up; statistics were brandished about; wonderful and novel remedies were suggested; and one of the more ingenious of the doctors came to the front in the person of Benjamin Rush.
Dr. Rush is one of the highly-eulogized. His benevolence was unexampled, and he was “honoured and esteemed, both at home and abroad. It was his constant object to popularize and render attractive the principles of medicine.”[7] He gave away his Sunday fees in charity;—and had a more intimate acquaintance with the human pulse than any man living!
After several attempts to master the yellow fever, of which violent purging formed the leading idea, Dr. Rush hit upon the plan of copious bleeding; and so successful was it (according to his own account) that ninety-nine out of every hundred of the cases he treated recovered! The other doctors said that Rush’s treatment was certain death. And so on.
The yellow fever went away for that time, but returned in 1797 with similar fatal results. Phlebotomy became again the rage, and the doctors still disagreed. Dr. William Currie implored his fellow-citizens to “open their eyes.” A Scotch physician, passing through Philadelphia, wrote a long letter to Porcupine’s Gazette, in which he argued strongly against this artificial hemorrhage, and declared that the physicians of the city had sunk from a position of eminence to “a condition bordering on contempt.”
But Dr. Rush had other merits, for he was a zealous republican, and a member of the Democratic Society of Philadelphia. He had supported Independence from before the Revolution, and was now one of that set of politicians who opposed Federalism; and, having thus incurred the displeasure of the British Corporal, that eminent writer resolved to have a fling at the doctor—a matter which was not so difficult, seeing that Rush had already inspired some amount of ridicule on the part of his fellow-citizens. Cobbett’s reading enabled him at once to find a parallel to the zealous phlebotomist. “Gil Blas” had already furnished him with many a happy stroke of humour, and, now that a rash bleeder was to be taken to task, where could be found anything so appropriate as the character of Dr. Sangrado, who would draw from a patient several porringers of blood in one day, who would bleed in a dropsy, who thought bleeding the proper means for supplying the want of perspiration, and who stood alone in his strange opinions? The picture was complete; and when to this jest was added the epithet of “quack,” besides an insinuation that Dr. Rush killed and tortured with purgatives more patients than he cured, the latter found it necessary to speak out, lest his fame and practice should be irretrievably damaged.
Besides Cobbett, another editor made himself obnoxious to Dr. Rush. This was Mr. J. W. Fenno, who had succeeded his father in the proprietorship of the Gazette of the United States, and who was firing away against bleeding in much the same spirit as Peter Porcupine. Also, “many gentlemen of Philadelphia (not physicians) expressed to me their dread of the practice and their indignation at the arts that were made use of to render it prevalent. They thought, and not without reason, that it was lawful, just, and fair to employ a newspaper in decrying what other newspapers had been employed to extol. In fact, I wanted very little persuasion, to induce me to combat the commendations of a practice which I had always looked upon as a scourge to the city in which I lived; but this practice and the wild opinions of the inventor and his followers really appeared to me to be too preposterous, too glaringly absurd, to merit serious animadversion; while, therefore, I admitted the sober refutations of those medical gentlemen who thought Rush worth their notice, I confined myself to squibs, puns, epigrams, and quotations from ‘Gil Blas.’ In this petite guerre I had an excellent auxiliary in Mr. Fenno, Jun. Never was a paper war carried on with greater activity and perseverance, or crowned with more complete success.”