It has been common to charge the friends of blood-letting with _temerity_ in their practice. From this view which has been given of it, it appears, that it would be more proper to ascribe _timidity_ to them, for they bleed to prevent the offensive and distressing consequences of neglecting it, which have been mentioned. 21. It cures, without permitting a fever to put on those alarming symptoms, which excite constant apprehensions of danger and death, in the minds of patients and their friends. It is because these alarming symptoms are prevented, by bleeding, that patients are sometimes unwilling to believe they have been cured by it, of a malignant fever. Thus, the Syrian leper of old, viewed the water of Jordan as too simple and too common to cure a formidable disease, without recollecting that the remedies for the greatest evils of life are all simple, and within the power of the greatest part of mankind. 22. It prepares the way for the successful use of the bark and other tonic remedies, by destroying, or so far weakening, a morbid action in the blood-vessels, that a medicine of a moderate stimulus afterwards exceeds it in force, and thereby restores equable and healthy action to the system. 23. Bleeding prevents relapses. It, moreover, prevents that predisposition to the intermitting and pleuritic states of fever, which so frequently attack persons in the spring, who have had the bilious remitting fever in the preceding autumn. But great and numerous as the advantages of blood-letting are in fevers, there have been many objections to it. I shall briefly enumerate, and endeavour to refute the errors upon this subject. Blood-letting has been forbidden by physicians, by the following circumstances, and states of the system. 1. By warm weather. Galen bled in a plague, and Aræteus in a bilious fever, in a warm climate. Dr. Sydenham and Dr. Hillary inform us, that the most inflammatory fevers occur in, and succeed hot weather. Dr. Cleghorn prescribed it copiously in the warm months, in Minorca. Dr. Mosely cured the yellow fever by this remedy, in Jamaica. Dr. Broadbelt, and Dr. Weston, in the same island, have lately adopted his successful practice. Dr. Desportes speaks in the highest terms of it in all the inflammatory diseases of St. Domingo. He complains of the neglect of it in the rheumatism, in consequence of which, he says, the disease produces abscesses in the lungs[49]. I have never, in any year of my practice, been restrained by the heat of summer in the use of the lancet, where the pulse has indicated it to be necessary, and have always found the same advantages from it, as when I have prescribed it in the winter or spring months. [49] Page 35.