From this general use of distilled and fermented liquors, drunkenness was a common vice in all the different ranks of society. The dresses of the men, in the years alluded to, were composed of cloth in winter, and of thin woollen or silk stuffs in summer. Wigs composed the covering of the head, after middle life, and cocked hats were universally worn, except by the men who belonged to the society of friends. The dresses of the women, in the years before mentioned, consisted chiefly of silks and calicoes. Stays were universal, and hoops were generally worn by the ladies in genteel life. Long cloth or camblet cloaks were common, in cold weather, among all classes of women. The principal custom under this head, which influenced health and life, was that which obliged women, after lying-in, "to sit up for company;" that is, to dress themselves, every afternoon on the second week after their confinement, and to sit for four or five hours, exposed to the impure air of a crowded room, and sometimes to long and loud conversations. Porches were nearly universal appendages to houses, and it was common for all the branches of a family to expose themselves upon them, to the evening air. Stoves were not in use, at that time, in any places of public worship. Funerals were attended by a large concourse of citizens, who were thereby often exposed to great heat and cold, and sometimes to standing, while the funeral obsequies were performed, in a wet or damp church-yard. The human mind, in this period of the history of our city, was in a colonized state, and the passions acted but feebly and partially upon literary and political subjects. We come now to mention the diseases which prevailed in our city between the years 1760 and 1766. The cholera morbus was a frequent disease in the summer months. Sporadic cases of dysentery were at that time common. I have never seen that disease epidemic in Philadelphia. The intermitting fever prevailed in the month of August, and in the autumn, chiefly in the suburbs and neighbourhood of the city. In the year 1765, it was epidemic in Southwark, and was so general, at the same time, as to affect two thirds of the inhabitants of the southern states. This fact is mentioned by Dr. Bond, in a lecture preserved in the minutes of the managers of the Pennsylvania hospital. The slow chronic fever, called at that time the nervous fever, was very common, in the autumnal months, in the thickly settled parts of the city. The bilious fever prevailed, at the same time, in Southwark. The late Dr. Clarkson, who began to practise medicine in that part of the city, in the year 1761, upon hearing some of his medical brethren speak of the appearance of bilious remittents in its middle and northern parts, about the year 1778, said they had long been familiar to him, and that he had met with them every year since his settlement in Philadelphia[66].