CHAPTER XXXVII.

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.