No one has ever objected to the _indiscriminate_ mode of preparing the body for the small-pox by purging medicines. The _uniform_ inflammatory diathesis of that disease justifies the practice, in a certain degree, in all habits. The yellow fever admits of a sameness of cure much more than the small-pox, for it is _more_ uniformly and more highly inflammatory. An observation of Dr. Sydenham upon epidemics applies, in its utmost extent, to our late fever. "Now it must be observed (says this most acute physician) that some epidemic diseases, in some years, are uniformly and constantly the same[73]." However diversified our fever was in some of its symptoms, it was in all cases accompanied by more or less inflammatory diathesis, and by a morbid state of the alimentary canal. [73] Vol. i. p. 9. Much has been said of the bad effects of this purge from its having been put up carelessly by the apothecaries, or from its having been taken contrary to the printed directions, by many people. If it did harm in any one case (which I do not believe) from the former of the above causes the fault is not mine. Twenty men employed constantly in putting up this medicine would not have been sufficient to have complied with all the demands which were made of me for it. Hundreds who were in health called or sent for it as well as the sick, in order to have it in readiness in case they should be surprised by the disease in the night, or at a distance from a physician. In all the cases in which this purge was supposed to have been hurtful, when given on the first or second day of the disease, I believe it was because it was not followed by repeated doses of the same, or of some other purge, or because it was not aided by blood-letting. I am led to make this assertion, not only from the authority of Dr. Sydenham, who often mentions the good effects of bleeding in moderating or checking a diarrh[oe]a, but by having heard no complaints of patients being purged to death by this medicine, after blood-letting was universally adopted by all the physicians in the city. It was remarked that the demand for this purging powder continued to increase under all opposition, and that the sale of it by the apothecaries was greatest towards the close of the disease. I shall hereafter say that this was not the case with the West-India remedies. It is possible that this purge sometimes proved hurtful when it was given on the fifth day of the disease, but it was seldom given for the _first_ time after the third day, and when it was, the patient was generally in such a situation that nothing did him either good or harm.