In contemplating the prejudices against blood-letting, which formerly prevailed so generally in our country, I have been led to ascribe them to a cause wholly political. We are descended chiefly from Great-Britain, and have been for many years under the influence of English habits upon all subjects. Some of these habits, as far as they relate to government, have been partly changed; but in dress, arts, manufactures, manners, and science, we are still governed by our early associations. Britain and France have been, for many centuries, hereditary enemies. The hostility of the former to the latter nation, extends to every thing that belongs to their character. It discovers itself, in an eminent degree, in diet and medicine. Do the French love soups? the English prefer solid flesh. Do the French love their meats well cooked? the English prefer their meats but half roasted. Do the French sip coffee after dinner? the English spend their afternoons in drinking Port and Madeira wines. Do the French physicians prescribe purges and glysters to cleanse the bowels? the English physicians prescribe vomits for the same purpose. Above all, do the French physicians advise bleeding in fevers? the English physicians forbid it, in most fevers, and substitute sweating in the room of it. Here then we discover the source of the former prejudices and errors of our country-men, upon the subject of blood-letting. They are of British origin. They have been inculcated in British universities, and in British books; and they accord as ill with our climate and state of society, as the Dutch foot stoves did with the temperate climate of the Cape of Good Hope[65]. [65] I have frequently been surprised, in visiting English patients, to hear them say, when I have prescribed bleeding, that their physicians in England had charged them never to be bled. This advice excluded all regard to the changes which climate, diet, new employments, and age might induce upon the system. I am disposed to believe that many lives are lost, and numerous chronic diseases created in Great-Britain, by the neglect of bleeding in fevers. My former pupil, Dr. Fisher, in a letter from the university of Edinburgh, dated in the winter of 1795, assured me, that he had cured several of his fellow-students of fevers (contrary to general prejudice) by early bleeding, in as easy and summary a way as he had been accustomed to see them cured in Philadelphia, by the use of the same remedy. Dr. Gordon, of Scotland, and several other physicians in Great-Britain, have lately revived the lancet, and applied it with great judgment and success to the cure of fevers.