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At the outset of the disease, Dr. Rush had treated it in the same manner as that adopted by the medical faculty of the city; but the ill success which attended this course soon satisfied him that the treatment was wrong. He therefore undertook to subdue it by purging and bleeding the patient, and succeeded. The new practice met with the fiercest opposition from the other physicians, but Rush could triumphantly point to the fact that while their patients were dying his were getting well; and he continued to carry out his treatment with firmness and success. Dr. Ramsey, of South Carolina, estimates that Rush, by this treatment, saved not less than six thousand of his patients from death in the "hundred days." Nevertheless, the medical war went on with great bitterness, and the opposition to Rush became furious when he boldly declared that the fever was not an importation from abroad, as was popularly believed, but had been generated by the filthy condition of the city during the early part of the summer. Some time after the fever had subsided, a paper called "Peter Porcupine's Gazette," edited by William Cobbett, made a series of outrageous attacks upon Dr. Rush and his treatment of the fever. This exhausted the forbearance of the doctor, and he instituted a suit against Cobbett, in which he was successful, and secured a verdict of $5,000 damages against his defamer. During the prevalence of the fever, Dr. Rush's labors were unceasing. He was constantly going his rounds, visiting the sick, attending sometimes over one hundred patients in a single day. He was called on at all hours of the day and night, and it may be said that he scarcely slept or enjoyed two hours, uninterrupted rest during the "hundred days."  PRESCRIBING AT THE BREAKFAST-TABLE. For weeks he never sat down to his meals without being surrounded by dozens of patients, whose complaints he listened to and prescribed for as he ate. These were chiefly the poor, and at such times his house was literally thronged with them. He was a kind friend to them; rendering his services promptly and heartily, without the slightest wish to receive pay in return for them; and during all this terrible summer he was to be seen ministering to these poor creatures in the foulest, most plague-stricken quarters of the city, shrinking from no danger, and deterred from his work of mercy by no thought of his own safety. He has left us the following picture of the city during this terrible summer: The disease appeared in many parts of the town remote from the spot where it originated; although in every instance it was easily traced to it. This set the city in motion. The streets and roads leading from the city were crowded with families flying in every direction for safety, to the country. Business began to languish. Water Street, between Market and Race Streets, became a desert. The poor were the first victims of the fever. From the sudden interruption of business, they suffered for a while from poverty as well as disease. A large and airy house at Bush-hill, about a mile from the city, was opened for their reception. This house, after it became the charge of a committee appointed by the citizens on the 14th of September, was regulated and governed with the order and cleanliness of an old and established hospital. An American and French physician had the exclusive medical care of it after the 22d of September. The contagion, after the second week in September, spared no rank of citizens. Whole families were confined by it. There was a deficiency of nurses for the sick, and many of those who were employed were unqualified for their business. There was likewise a great deficiency of physicians, from the desertion of some and the sickness and death of others. At one time there were only three physicians able to do business out of their houses, and at this time there were probably not less than six thousand persons ill with the fever. During the first three or four weeks of the prevalence of the disorder, I seldom went into a house the first time without meeting the parents or children of the sick in tears. Many wept aloud in my entry or parlor, who came to ask advice for their relations. Grief after a while descended below weeping, and I was much struck in observing that many persons submitted to the loss of relations and friends without shedding a tear, or manifesting any other of the common signs of grief. A cheerful countenance was scarcely to be seen in the city for six weeks. I recollect once, on entering the house of a poor man, to have met a child of two years old that smiled in my face. I was strangely affected with this sight (so discordant to my feelings and the state of the city), before I recollected the age and ignorance of the child. I was confined the next day by an attack of the fever, and was sorry to hear, upon my recovery, that the father and mother of this little creature died a few days after my last visit to them. The streets every-where discovered marks of the distress that pervaded the city. More than one-half the houses were shut up, although not more than one-third of the inhabitants had fled into the country. In walking, for many hundred yards, few persons were met, except such as were in quest of a physician, a nurse, a bleeder, or the men who buried the dead. The hearse alone kept up the remembrance of the noise of carriages or carts in the streets. Funeral processions were laid aside. A black man leading or driving a horse, with a corpse on a pair of chair-wheels, with now and then half a dozen relations or friends following at a distance from it, met the eye in most of the streets of the city, at every hour of the day, while the noise of the same wheels passing slowly over the pavements, kept alive anguish and fear in the sick and well, every hour of the night. The population of Philadelphia at this time was but sixty thousand, and the reader will see that a loss of four thousand was a heavy percentage for so short a period. Dr. Rush's skill and heroic conduct in his efforts to stay the ravages of the plague made him famous, not only in his own country, but throughout Europe, and during the latter part of his life he received most gratifying evidences of this fact. In 1805 the King of Prussia sent him a coronation medal, and the King of Spain tendered him his thanks for his replies to certain questions addressed to him concerning the causes and proper treatment of yellow fever. In 1807 the Queen of Etruria presented him with a gold medal as a mark of respect; and in 1811 the Emperor of Russia sent him a testimonial of his admiration of his medical character. In 1799 he was made treasurer of the United States Mint, which position he held until his death. Dr. Rush's writings were voluminous, and embraced a variety of subjects. His medical productions occupy a high place in the literature of the profession, and his political essays were one of the features of his day. He was a man of profound learning, and it is astonishing that one so constantly occupied with the duties of an engrossing profession should have found the time for such close and thorough general reading. He was a sincere and earnest Christian, and held the Bible in the highest veneration. He wrote an able defense of the use of it as a school-book, and for many years was vice-president of the Philadelphia Bible Society, which he helped to establish, and the constitution of which he drafted. He held skepticism and atheism in the deepest abhorrence, and in his own life affords a powerful refutation of the assertion one hears so often, that profound medical knowledge is apt to make men infidels. He died in Philadelphia on the 19th of April, 1813, at the good old age of sixty-eight, leaving a son who was destined to render additional luster to his name by achieving the highest distinction as a statesman.
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