It was from a conviction of the utility of low diet, gentle evacuations, and of carefully shunning all the exciting causes which I have mentioned, that I concealed, in no instance, from my patients the name of their disease. This plainness, which was blamed by weak people, produced strict obedience to my directions, and thereby restrained the progress of the fever in many families, or rendered it, when taken, as mild as inoculation does the small-pox. The opposite conduct of several physicians, by preventing the above precautions, increased the mortality of the disease, and, in some instances, contributed to the extinction of whole families. I proceed now to make a few remarks upon the remedies recommended by Doctors Kuhn and Stevens, and by the French physicians. The former were bark, wine, laudanum, spices, the elixir of vitriol, and the cold bath. In every case in which I prescribed bark, it was offensive to the stomach. In several tertians which attended the convalescence from a common attack of the fever, I found it always unsuccessful, and once hurtful. Mr. Willing took it for several weeks without effect. About half a pint of a weak decoction of the bark produced, in Mr. Samuel Meredith, a paroxysm of the fever, so violent as to require the loss of ten ounces of blood to moderate it. Dr. Annan informed me that he was forced to bleed one of his patients twice, after having given him a small quantity of bark, to hasten his convalescence. It was not in this epidemic only that the bark was hurtful. Baron Humboldt informed me, that Dr. Comoto had assured him, it hastened death in every case in which it was given in the yellow fever of Vera Cruz. If, in any instance, it was inoffensive, or did service, in our fever, I suspect it must have acted upon the bowels as a purge. Dr. Sydenham says the bark cured intermittents by this evacuation[90]; and Mr. Bruce says it operated in the same way, when it cured the bilious fevers at Massuah. [90] Vol. i. p. 440. _Wine_ was nearly as disagreeable as the bark to the stomach, and equally hurtful. I tried it in every form, and of every quality, but without success. It was either rejected by the stomach, or produced in it a burning sensation. I should suspect that I had been mistaken in my complaints against wine, had I not since met with an account in Skenkius of its having destroyed all who took it in the famous Hungarian fever, which prevailed, with great mortality, over nearly every country in Europe, about the middle of the 16th century[91]. Dr. Wade declares wine to be "ill adapted to the fevers of Bengal, where the treatment has been proper in other respects." [91] Omnes qui vini potione non abstinuerunt, interiere, adeo ut summa spes salvationis in vini abstinentia collocata videreter. Lib. vi. p. 847.