Upon my leaving Mrs Le Maigre's, I expressed my distress at what I had discovered, to several of my fellow-citizens. The report of a malignant and mortal fever being in town spread in every direction, but it did not gain universal credit. Some of those physicians who had not seen patients in it denied that any such fever existed, and asserted (though its mortality was not denied) that it was nothing but the common annual remittent of the city. Many of the citizens joined the physicians in endeavoring to discredit the account I had given of this fever, and for a while it was treated with ridicule or contempt. Indignation in some instances was excited against me, and one of my friends, whom I advised in this early stage of the disease to leave the city, has since told me that for that advice "he had hated me." My lot in having thus disturbed the repose of the public mind, upon the subject of general health, was not a singular one. There are many instances upon record, of physicians who have rendered themselves unpopular, and even odious to their fellow-citizens, by giving the first notice of the existence of malignant and mortal diseases. A physician, who asserted that the plague was in Messina, in the year 1743, excited so much rage in the minds of his fellow-citizens against him, as to render it necessary for him to save his life by retreating to one of the churches of that city. In spite, however, of all opposition, the report of the existence of a malignant fever in the city gained so much ground, that the governor of the state directed Dr. Hutchinson, the inspector of sickly vessels, to inquire into the truth of it, and into the nature of the disease. In consequence of this order, the doctor wrote letters to several of the physicians in the city, requesting information relative to the fever. To his letter to me, dated the 24th of August, I replied on the same day, and mentioned not only the existence of a malignant fever, but the streets it occupied, and my belief of its being derived from a quantity of coffee which had putrified on a wharf near Arch-street. This, and other information collected by the doctor, was communicated to the health officer, in a letter dated the 27th of August, in which he mentioned the parts of the city where the disease prevailed, and the number of persons who had died of it, supposed by him to be about 40, but which subsequent inquiries proved to be more than 150. He mentioned further, in addition to the damaged coffee, some putrid hides, and other putrid animal and vegetable substances, as the supposed cause of the fever, and concluded by saying, as he had not heard of any foreigners or sailors being infected, nor of its being found in any lodging-houses, that "it was not an imported disease." In the mean while the disease continued to spread, and with a degree of mortality that had never been known from common fevers.