"In the month of November of the above-mentioned year I attended the eldest son of sir Francis Wyndham in this fever. He complained of a pain in his side, and the other symptoms that attended those who had this disease. I bled him but once, applied a blister to his neck, injected clysters every day, gave him cooling ptisans and-emulsions, and sometimes milk and water, or small beer, to drink; and advised his sitting up a few hours every day; and by this method he recovered in a few days, and a purge completed the cure.

"But it must be remarked, that though these were the symptoms which succeeded the cough, during this winter, yet the cough, unattended with these symptoms, was more prevalent at the same time. But this required neither bleeding nor clysters, provided a fever was not occasioned by a hot regimen or heating medicines; it sufficed to allow the benefit of the open air, and to forbid the use of flesh, wine, and such spirituous liquors which are apt to cause a fever." Wallis's Sydenham.

In the month of July, 1775, the putrid fever came on; was succeeded by the cholera morbus in August, and the bilious fever in September, as usual; this bilious fever, however, was attended with a degree of stupor, which went off with the other symptoms when properly treated; but was easily turned into a coma, when improperly treated at any period of the disease. See Dr. Grant's Account of the Epidemic Cough and Fever, 1776, from Sydenham.

This subject hath engaged the attention of many since the year 1775; and in 1782, Dr. J. C. Smyth gave his observations of this disorder, in the first volume of Medical Communications, p. 71, etc. the substance of which is as follows:

"The late influenza was very generally accompanied not only with the usual catarrhal symptoms, but with others no less distressing to the patient, and which were still more alarming to the physician; such as great languor, lowness, and oppression at the praecordia; anxiety, with frequent sighing, sickness, and violent headach. The pulse was uncommonly quick and irregular, and the sick were frequently delirious, especially in the night. The heat of the body was seldom considerable, particularly when compared with the violence of the other symptoms; the skin was moist, with a tendency to profuse sweating; the tongue white or yellowish, but moist. Some persons complained of severe muscular pains either general or local, others had erysipelatous patches or efflorescences on different parts of the body, which in one instance terminated in gangrene and death. I observed petechias but once, and then only two days before death. Those attacked with the influenza were in general taken suddenly ill, and the symptems in the beginning, or for the first twenty-four or forty-eight hours, were extremely violent, bearing no proportion either to the danger or duration of the distemper. Children and old people either escaped entirely, or were affected in a slighter manner. Women with child, when seized with the disease, were apt to miscarry; or, if far advanced in their pregnancy, to be delivered before their time; in either case, the haemorrhage was considerable, and several died. Patients subject to pulmonic complaints suffered much from th cough, difficult breathing, and other peripneumonic symptoms, and to them also the disease proved dangerous or fatal.

"The headach which accompanied the influenza may be distinguished into three kinds.

" 1st. The uneasy weight, soreness, and distention, of the forehead, usual in common colds.

"2dly. The violent sick headach, arising from the affection of the stomach, and relieved by vomiting.

"3dly. The headach, during which the patients complained of a sensation as if their head was splitting, with a severe shooting pain at the vertex; this last headach was most usual in peripneumonic cases, and seemed chiefly occasioned by the violence of the cough.

"The fever began with irregular chilliness, had considerable exacerbations and remissions, and was always greatly increased towards night; but even then the heat of the body and thirst were seldom so great as might have been expected, and the accessions of fever were chiefly marked by the increased quickness of pulse and delirium. The frequency of the pulse was greater than is common in fevers; (it was often 120, even in the remissions of fever, in the accessions 140, and sometimes so frequent that it was impossible to reckon it: in many instances it was irregular and intermitting;) nor do I remember to have felt so frequent, and at the same time so irregular, a pulse (the irregularity of the pulse is in a great measure characteristic of malignant contagious fevers), in any fever attended with so little danger, and of so speedy and easy a termination; the violence of this being commonly over in twenty-four or forty-eight hours. Many, from the beginning, were delirious in the night time and during the exacerbation of fever, who were perfectly recollected and distinct in the day and during the remissions; but even where the delirium continued, it was not a constant one, as the sick knew those who spoke to them, would answer some questions distinctly, and a few minutes afterwards talk. incoherently; a fixed stare of the eyes at the time, and a kind of wildness in the countenance, were also very expressive of this state or condition. The delirium which we have just now described, though unnoticed (so far as I know) by any practical writer, is not unusual in the putrid fever, and differs as materially from the low delirium incident to the last stage of that disease, as it does from the phrenetic delirium of the fe-bris ardens, or of any inflammatory fever. During the whole of the influenza, I met only one instance of true phrenetic delirium; and it may not be foreign to the purpose to remark, that it happened to a patient who had been three times bled, had swallowed no heating cordials, and who was taken every day out of bed, conformable to the judicious practice of Sydenham (vid. De Febre Comatosa), expressly with the intention of preventing this termination of the disease. Respecting the danger of the influenza, physicians, I find, have entertained somewhat opposite opinions; possibly owing to the difference of place and situation. In London, although the distemper doubtless proved fatal to many, yet it could hardly be accounted a dangerous one, if the number who died be compared with the prodigious number of those who recovered.