h of the season of
frosts, as the only means of saving those that remained in the stricken
city.

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."

[Illustration: 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