38 INTRODUCTION. 



it results that the prevalence of pulmonary affections has been produced by erro- 

 neous personal and social habits. Dr. Colden's elaborate paper on the manage- 

 ment of the fever of New- York, w^hich prevailed in 1742 ; his account of the 

 plant called " water dock," and his earnest recommendation of the cooling pro- 

 cess, in the cure of fevers, an innovation on the therapeutic measures of that age, 

 are yet held in high estimation.* 



Dr. John Bard, already mentioned, published an able essay on the nature and 

 cause of malignant pleurisy, which proved very fatal on Long Island in 1749, 

 and astonished his medical brethren in New- York in 1795, by identifying at once 

 the pestilence, which then ravaged the city, with the malignant yellow fever, of 

 which not a case had occurred within his observation, since its previous visit in 

 1742. 



His son Samuel Bard, while a student at the university of Edinburgh, received 

 the Hope medal as an acknowledgment of his acquirements in botany, and his 

 inaugural dissertation, de viribus opii, attracted the attention of the erudite Haller. 

 He made other contributions to medical science, of which his " Inquiry into the 

 nature, cause and cure of the angina suffocativa," or sore throat, a disease attended 

 with great mortality in New- York, will perhaps be longest remembered. 



Dr. Jacob Ogden, of Long Island, in 1769 and 1774, addressed to the public, 

 letters on the same disease, which are worthy of reference, because they urge 

 with boldness the mercurial practice, which, although it had been before sug- 

 gested by Dr. Douglass, had not yet obtained any general favor. 



Dr. Richard Bayley, in 1781, published a letter to Dr. WiUiam Hunter of 

 London, on "Angina Trachealis," or the croup, setting forth a new mode of cure 

 of that very alarming and too often fatal inflammation, and subsequent expe- 

 rience in this and other countries has confirmed the utility of the discovery. 



In 1769, a medical faculty was projected and associated vdth the academic 

 corps of King's, now Columbia College. This measure awakened an active spirit 



 Dr. PBtNcis' Discourse before the New- York Lyceum of Natural History. 



