Should the immediate success of tonic and depleting remedies in destroying the fever be equal, the effects of the former upon the constitution cannot fail of being less safe than the latter remedies. They cure by overstraining the powers of life. There is the same difference, therefore, between the two modes of practice, that there is between gently lifting the latch of a door, and breaking it open in order to go into a house. _Wine_ was hurtful in every case of yellow fever in which it was given, while there were any remains of inflammatory action in the system. I recollect that a few spoonsful of it, which Mr. Harrison of Virginia took in the depressed state of his pulse, excited a sensation in his stomach which he compared to a fire. Even wine-whey, in the excitable state of the system induced by this fever, was sometimes hurtful. In a patient of Dr. Physick, who was on the recovery, it produced a relapse that had nearly proved fatal, in the year 1795. Dr. Desperrieres ascribes the death of a patient to a small quantity of wine given to him by a black nurse[124]. These facts are important, inasmuch as wine is a medicine which patients are most apt to use in all cases, without the advice of a physician. [124] Vol. ii. p. 108. I observed _opium_ to be less hurtful in this fever than it was in the fever of 1793. I administered a few drops of laudanum, in one case, in the form of a glyster, in a violent pain of the bowels, with evident advantage, before the inflammatory action of the blood-vessels was subdued. In this way I have often obtained the composing effects of laudanum where it has been rejected by the stomach. But I gave it sparingly, and in small doses only, in the early stage of the fever. John Madge, whose pains in his bowels were often as exquisite as they are in the most acute colic, did not take a single drop of it. I used no anodyne in his case but bleeding, and applications of cold water to the inside and outside of his bowels. After the fever had passed the seventh day, and had been so far subdued by copious evacuations as to put on the form of a common inflammatory intermittent, I gave laudanum during the intermissions of the fever with great advantage. In some cases it suddenly checked the paroxysms of the fever, while in many more it only moderated them, but in such a manner that they wore themselves away in eight or ten days. One of my female patients, who had taken bitters of every kind without effect to cure a tertian, which succeeded a yellow fever, took a large dose of laudanum, in the interval of her paroxysms, to cure a tooth-ach. To her great surprise it removed her tertian. The effects of laudanum in this fever were very different from those of bark. Where it did no service it did not, like the bark, do any harm.