[66] From the early knowledge this excellent physician and worthy man had thus acquired of the bilious remitting fever, he was very successful in the treatment of it. It was by instruction conveyed by him to me with peculiar delicacy, that I was first taught the advantages of copious evacuations from the bowels in that disease. I had been called, when a young practitioner, to visit a gentleman with him in a bilious pleurisy. A third or fourth bleeding, which I advised, cured him. The doctor was much pleased with its effect, and said to me afterwards, "Doctor, you and I have each a great fault in our practice; I do not bleed enough, you do not purge enough." The yellow fever prevailed in the neighbourhood of Spruce-street wharf, and near a filthy stream of water which flowed through what is now called Dock-street, in the year 1762. Some cases of it appeared likewise in Southwark. It was scarcely known in the north and west parts of the city. No desertion of the citizens took place at this time, nor did the fear of contagion drive the friends of the sick from their bed-sides, nor prevent the usual marks of respect being paid to them after death, by following their bodies to the grave. A few sporadic cases of the same grade of fever appeared in the year 1763. Pneumonies, rheumatisms, inflammatory sore throats, and catarrhs were frequent during the winter and spring months. The last disease was induced, not only by sudden changes in the weather, but often by exposure to the evening air, on porches in summer, and by the damp and cold air of places of public worship in winter. The influenza was epidemic in the city in the spring of the year 1761. The malignant sore throat proved fatal to a number of children in the winter of 1763. The scarlet fever prevailed generally in the year 1764. It resembled the same disease, as described by Dr. Sydenham, in not being accompanied by a sore throat. Death from convulsions in pregnant women, also front parturition, and the puerperile fever, were common between the years 1760 and 1766. Death was likewise common between the 50th and 60th years of life from gout, apoplexy, palsy, obstructed livers, and dropsies. A club, consisting of about a dozen of the first gentlemen in the city, all paid, for their intemperance, the forfeit of their lives between those ages, and most of them with some one, or more of the diseases that have been mentioned. I sat up with one of that club on the night of his death. Several of the members of it called at his house, the evening before he died, to inquire how he was. One of them, upon being informed of his extreme danger, spoke in high and pathetic terms of his convivial talents and virtues, and said, "he had spent 200 evenings a year with him, for the last twenty years of his life." These evenings were all spent at public houses.