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, which 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. William 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 with the academic 
corps of King’s, now Columbia College. This measure awakened an active spirit 
* Dr. Francis’ Discourse before the New-York Lyceum of Natural History. 
