Gazette Of The United States, & Philadelphia Daily Advertiser

COMMUNICATIONS.

To A REGIMENTAL SURGEON.

Your feeble attempt at this late period to prove that our climate and soil is too poor to produce even a yellow fever, is too absurd in itself to require an answer. Has not this city produced democrats, jacobins and United Irishmen of American growth and origin? To these questions I am confident of your assent in the affirmative. I therefore proceed to enquire of you your reason, if you have any, for a supposition that a tropical or foreign disease may not be as easily generated here as an United Irishman or a French jacobin.

And as this is a speculative question in which no risque can be encountered except by engaging against the strongest side, let us arrange our forces and count them.

On our side there are not only all the great doctors, but we have lately acquired the countenance and able assistance of the far famed and never-to-be-forgotten Noah Webster, Esq. M. D. T. Q. P. Z. celebrated author of the best spelling and horn books that have ever adorned the English language. This learned gentleman in his new history of pestilential diseases has with the most acute discernment placed his life and works chimical, galenical, political, critical, orthographical, and castigatical, at the head of the catalogue of incidental pests. We have also written to Dr. Perkins P. P. of pointed celebrity with the sanguine expectation that he will throw the weight of his name and reputation into our scale. How dare you then, Sir, to enter the list against this phalanx, this mass of physical, and I may safely add metaphyscal authorities ? Perhaps sir, you may by having a regiment at your command, vainly hope to defy us ; but do not deceive yourself, for although you may succeed with your few friends in partially undermining our new school, yet, sir, remember that it cannot fall without involving in one general and indiscriminate ruin both you and us ; should you shake that important belief which we are just about to establish, you will not only impoverish but perhaps annihilate that rich field which yet promises unparalleled fecundity. And why would you blast the hopeful harvest proceeding from our immense prospects of preventative practice ? Do you not know that on a belief of momentary danger and in our powers of early prevention our golden hopes and dreams do chiefly depend, and that in future the ordinary effects of indolence, of indigestion, and other slight causes of alarm in our patients will not be enough to call us to cases of an inveterate and incurable malady for such they would be thought and such we may have the reputation of conquering, for which we shall be paid both by fame and by Plutus—Add to this the odium of annual or periodical pestilence, attached to the bestates in our first cities, will secure a chance of purchase at half price whenever the true belief may be fully established. Of all this the experiment once made by a report that our pheasants had become poisonous from feeding on laurel, is a striking proof. These birds fell to nothing in price, and of course to the exclusive use of the FACULTY.

Now, can't you from all this take a hint—if you cannot, tremble for the consequences.