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 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