“In the great scarcity of help, he used frequently to receive the sick and dying at the gate, assist in carrying them to their beds, nurse them, receive their last messages, watch for their last breath, and then, wrapping them in the sheet on which they had died, carry them out to the burial ground and place them in the trench.  He had a vivid recollection of the difficulty of finding any kind of fabric in which to wrap the dead, when the vast number of interments had exhausted the supply of sheets.  ‘I would put them,’ he would say, ’in any old rag I could find.’”

[Illustration:  Girard’s heroism.]

“If he ever left the hospital, it was to visit the infected districts, and assist in removing the sick from the houses in which they were dying without help.  One scene of this kind, witnessed by a merchant who was hurrying past with camphored handkerchief pressed to his mouth, affords us a vivid glimpse of this heroic man engaged in his sublime vocation.  A carriage, rapidly driven by a black man, broke the silence of the deserted and grass-grown street.  It stopped before a frame house, and the driver, first having bound a handkerchief over his mouth, opened the door of the carriage, and quickly remounted to the box.  A short, thick-set man stepped from the coach and entered the house.  In a minute or two the observer, who stood at a safe distance watching the proceedings, heard a shuffling noise in the entry, and soon saw the stout little man supporting with extreme difficulty a tall, gaunt, yellow-visaged victim of the pestilence.  Girard held round the waist the sick man, whose yellow face rested against his own; his long, damp, tangled hair mingled with Girard’s; his feet dragging helpless upon the pavement.  Thus he drew him to the carriage door, the driver averting his face from the spectacle, far from offering to assist.  Partly dragging, partly lifting, Girard succeeded, after long and severe exertion, in getting him into the vehicle.  He then entered it himself, closed the door, and the carriage drove away toward the hospital."[A]

For sixty days Mr. Girard continued to discharge his duties, never absenting himself from his post, being nobly sustained by Peter Helm.

Again, in 1797 and 1798, when the city was scourged a second and a third time with the fever, he volunteered his services, and more than earned the gratitude of his fellow-citizens.  In the absence of physicians, he took upon himself the office of prescribing for the sick, and as his treatment involved careful nursing and the use of simple remedies only, he was very successful.  In 1799 he wrote to his friend Devize, then in France, but who had been the physician at the Bush Hill Hospital in 1793: 

“During all this frightful time I have constantly remained in the city, and, without neglecting any public duties, I have played a part which will make you smile.  Would you believe it, my friend, that I have visited as many as fifteen sick people in a day, and what will surprise you still more, I have lost only one patient, an Irishman, who would drink a little.  I do not flatter myself that I have cured one single person, but you will think with me that in my quality of Philadelphia physician I have been very moderate, and that not one of my confreres have killed fewer than myself.”