On The Free Use Of The Lancet[130]

In Yellow Fevers[A]

[A] A practice very prevalent at the time the above was written.--_Freneau's note._

In former days your starch'd divines From notes of twenty thousand lines Held many a long dispute; One argued this, one argued that, And reverend wigs, as umpires sat, All sophists to confute.

They dwelt on things beyond their ken And teazed and puzzled simple men To hold them in the dark; But their long season now is past, The churchman's horn has blown its blast, Things take a different mark.

Physicians now to quiet pain Stick lancet in the patient's vein That burns with feverish heat: The next contend, they're wholly wrong, That life will leak away ere long If thus the case they treat.

Meantime a practice gets about, Perhaps to make some doctors pout: Old Shelah, with her herbs and teas, And scarce a shilling for her fees, In many instances, at least, When deaths and funerals increased, Did more to dispossess the fever, Did more from dying beds deliver Than all the hippocratian host Could by the lancet's virtue boast; To which, I trow, full many a ghost Will have a grudge forever.

From the edition of 1815. The yellow fever epidemic of 1797 created more than usual consternation. It was supposed to be of a more deadly type than that of 1793. The medical profession was divided as to the treatment of the disease. "Two hostile schools sprang up. At the head of one was William Currie. Benjamin Rush led the other. The Currie men declared the fever was imported and contagious. The Rush school maintained that it was not. Filthy streets, they held, and loathsome alleys had much to do with the sickness, and they urged the use of mercurial purges and the copious letting of blood_."--McMaster._