"All these acute putrid fevers ever require some evacuation to bring them to a perfect crisis and solution, and that even by stools, which must be promoted by art, where nature does not do the business herself. On this account an _ill-timed scrupulousness about the weakness of the body_ is of bad consequence in these urging circumstances; for it is that which seems chiefly to make evacuations necessary, which nature ever attempts, after the humours are fit to be expelled, but is not able to accomplish for the most part in this disease; and I can affirm that I have given a purge in this case, when _the pulse has been so low, that it could hardly be felt_, and the _debility extreme_, yet _both one and the other_ have been _restored by it_." "This evacuation must be procured by _lenitive chologoque_ purges." Here I paused. A new train of ideas suddenly broke in upon my mind. I believed the weak and low pulse which I had observed in this fever, to be the effect of debility from a depressed state of the system, but the unsuccessful issue of purging, and even of a spontaneous diarrh[oe]a, in a patient of Dr. Hutchinson, had led me not only to doubt of, but to dread its effects. My fears from this evacuation were confirmed, by the communications I had received from Dr. Stevens. I had been accustomed to raising a weak and low pulse in pneumony and apoplexy, by means of blood-letting, but I had attended less to the effects of purging in producing this change in the pulse. Dr. Mitchell in a moment dissipated my ignorance and fears upon this subject. I adopted his theory and practice, and resolved to follow them. It remained now only to fix upon a suitable purge to answer the purpose of discharging the contents of the bowels. I have before described the state of the bile in the gall-bladder and duodenum, in an extract from the history of a dissection made by Dr. Mitchell. I suspected that my want of success in discharging this bile, in several of the cases in which I attempted the cure by purging, was owing the feebleness of my purges. I had been in the habit of occasionally purging with calomel in bilious and inflammatory fevers, and had recommended the practice the year before in my lectures, not only from my own experience, but upon the authority of Dr. Clark. I had, moreover, other precedents for its use in the practice of sir John Pringle, Dr. Cleghorn, and Dr. Balfour, in diseases of the same class with the yellow fever. But these were not all my vouchers for the safety and efficacy of calomel. In my attendance upon the military hospitals during the late war, I had seen it given combined with jalap in the bilious fever by Dr. Thomas Young, a senior surgeon in the hospitals. His usual dose was ten grains of each of them. This was given once or twice a day until it procured large evacuations from the bowels. For a while I remonstrated with the doctor against this purge, as being disproportioned