e United States, and distinguished himself in that
body by his earnest and brilliant advocacy of that instrument. He was
also a member of the convention which adopted a new State Constitution,
embodying the reforms he had advised in the letters referred to, and
labored hard to have incorporated in it his views respecting a penal
code and a public school system, both of which features he ably
advocated through the public press.

With this closed his public career, which, though brief, was brilliant,
and raised him to a proud place among the fathers of the Republic.

Returning to Philadelphia after resigning his position in the army, he
resumed the practice of medicine, and with increased success. His
personal popularity and his great skill as a physician brought him all
the employment he could desire, and he soon took his place at the head
of the medical faculty of the country.

In 1785 he planned the Philadelphia Dispensary, the first institution of
the kind in the United States, and to the close of his life remained its
warm and energetic supporter. In 1789 he was made Professor of the
Theory and Practice of Medicine in the Philadelphia Medical College, and
when that institution was merged in the University, in 1791, he was
elected to the chair of the Institute and Clinical Medicine. In 1797 he
took the professorship of Clinical Practice also, as it was vacant, and
was formally elected to it in 1805. These three professorships he held
until the day of his death, discharging the duties of each with
characteristic brilliancy and fidelity.

The great professional triumph of his life occurred in the year 1793. In
that year the yellow fever broke out with great malignancy in
Philadelphia, and raged violently for about one hundred days, from about
the last of July until the first of November. Nothing seemed capable of
checking it. The people fled in dismay from their homes, and the city
seemed given over to desolation. In the terrible "hundred days," during
which the fever prevailed, four thousand persons died, and the deaths
occurred so rapidly that it was frequently impossible to bury the bodies
for several days. The physicians of the city, though they remained
heroically at their posts, and labored indefatigably in their exertions
to stay the plague, were powerless against it, and several of them were
taken sick and died. Few had any hope of checking the fever, and every
one looked forward with eagerness to the approac