Baffled in every attempt to stop the ravages of this fever, I anticipated all the numerous and complicated distresses in our city, which pestilential diseases have so often produced in other countries. The fever had a malignity and an obstinacy which I had never before observed in any disease, and it spread with a rapidity and mortality far beyond what it did in the year 1762. Heaven alone bore witness to the anguish of my soul in this awful situation. But I did not abandon a hope that the disease might yet be cured. I had long believed that good was commensurate with evil, and that there does not exist a disease for which the goodness of Providence has not provided a remedy. Under the impression of this belief I applied myself with fresh ardour to the investigation of the disease before me. I ransacked my library, and pored over every book that treated of the yellow fever. The result of my researches for a while was fruitless. The accounts of the symptoms and cure of the disease by the authors I consulted were contradictory, and none of them appeared altogether applicable to the prevailing epidemic. Before I desisted from the inquiry to which I had devoted myself, I recollected that I had, among some old papers, a manuscript account of the yellow fever as it prevailed in Virginia in the year 1741, which had been put into my hands by Dr. Franklin, a short time before his death. I had read it formerly, and made extracts from it into my lectures upon that disease. I now read it a second time. I paused upon every sentence; even words in some places arrested and fixed my attention. In reading the history of the method of cure I was much struck with the following passages. "It must be remarked, that this evacuation (meaning by purges) is more necessary in this than in most other fevers. The abdominal viscera are the parts principally affected in this disease, but by this timely evacuation their feculent corruptible contents are discharged, before they corrupt and produce any ill effects, and their various emunctories and secerning vessels are set open, so as to allow a free discharge of their contents, and consequently a security to the parts themselves, during the course of the disease. By this evacuation the very minera of the disease, proceeding from the putrid miasmata fermenting with the salivary, bilious, and other inquiline humours of the body, is sometimes eradicated by timely emptying the abdominal viscera, on which it first fixes, after which a gentle sweat does as it were nip it in its bud. Where the primæ viæ, but especially the stomach, is loaded with an offensive matter, or contracted and convulsed with the irritation of its stimulus, there is no procuring a laudable sweat till that is removed; after which a necessary quantity of sweat breaks _out of its own accord_, these parts promoting it when by an absterging medicine they are eased of the burden or stimulus which oppresses them."