1. It raised the pulse when low, and reduced it when it was preternaturally tense or full. 2. It revived and strengthened the patient. This was evident in many cases, in the facility with which patients who had staggered to a close-stool, walked back again to their beds after a copious evacuation. Dr. Sydenham takes notice of a similar increase of strength after a plentiful sweat in the plague. They both acted by abstracting excess of stimulus, and thereby removing the depression of the system. 3. It abated the paroxysm of the fever. Hence arose the advantage of giving a purge in some cases in the evening, when an attack of the fever was expected in the course of the night. 4. It frequently produced sweats when given on the first or second day of the fever, after the most powerful sudorifics had been taken to no purpose. 5. It sometimes checked that vomiting which occurs in the beginning of the disease, and it always assisted in preventing the more alarming occurrence of that symptom about the 4th or 5th day. 6. It removed obstructions in the lymphatic system. I ascribe it wholly to the action of mercury, that in no instance did any of the glandular swellings, which I formerly mentioned, terminate in a suppuration. 7. By discharging the bile through the bowels as soon and as fast as it was secreted, it prevented, in most cases, a yellowness of the skin. [66] In some short manuscript notes upon Dr. Mitchell's account of the yellow fever in Virginia, in the year 1741, made by the late Dr. Kearsley, sen. of this city, he remarks, that in the yellow fever which prevailed in the same year in Philadelphia, "some recovered by an _early_ discharge of _black_ matter by stool." This gentleman, Dr. Redman informed me, introduced purging with glauber's salts in the yellow fever in our city. He was preceptor to Dr. Redman in medicine. However salutary the mercurial purge was, objections were made to it by many of our physicians; and prejudices, equally weak and ill-founded, were excited against it. I shall enumerate, and answer those objections.