Dr. Rush is one of the highly-eulogized. His benevolence was unexampled, and he was “honoured and esteemed, both at home and abroad. It was his constant object to popularize and render attractive the principles of medicine.”[7] He gave away his Sunday fees in charity;--and had a more intimate acquaintance with the human pulse than any man living! After several attempts to master the yellow fever, of which violent purging formed the leading idea, Dr. Rush hit upon the plan of copious bleeding; and so successful was it (according to his own account) that ninety-nine out of every hundred of the cases he treated recovered! The other doctors said that Rush’s treatment was certain death. And so on. The yellow fever went away for that time, but returned in 1797 with similar fatal results. Phlebotomy became again the rage, and the doctors still disagreed. Dr. William Currie implored his fellow-citizens to “open their eyes.” A Scotch physician, passing through Philadelphia, wrote a long letter to _Porcupine’s Gazette_, in which he argued strongly against this artificial hemorrhage, and declared that the physicians of the city had sunk from a position of eminence to “a condition bordering on contempt.” But Dr. Rush had other merits, for he was a zealous republican, and a member of the Democratic Society of Philadelphia. He had supported Independence from before the Revolution, and was now one of that set of politicians who opposed Federalism; and, having thus incurred the displeasure of the British Corporal, that eminent writer resolved to have a fling at the doctor--a matter which was not so difficult, seeing that Rush had already inspired some amount of ridicule on the part of his fellow-citizens. Cobbett’s reading enabled him at once to find a parallel to the zealous phlebotomist. “Gil Blas” had already furnished him with many a happy stroke of humour, and, now that a rash bleeder was to be taken to task, where could be found anything so appropriate as the character of _Dr. Sangrado_, who would draw from a patient several porringers of blood in one day, who would bleed in a dropsy, who thought bleeding the proper means for supplying the want of perspiration, and who stood alone in his strange opinions? The picture was complete; and when to this jest was added the epithet of “quack,” besides an insinuation that Dr. Rush killed and tortured with purgatives more patients than he cured, the latter found it necessary to speak out, lest his fame and practice should be irretrievably damaged.