will often succeed in substituting a fit of crying-which, I need hardly say, is attended with no danger at all-for a spasmodic fit, which, under the routine treatment, is never free from it. Only get the child to cry, and you need not trouble yourself more about it; for no human creature can possibly weep and have a convulsive fit of the epileptic or fainting kind at the same moment. Convulsive sobbing is a phenomenon perfectly incompatible with these movements; for it depends upon a reverse action in the atoms of the brain. The only thing which may prevent some of you from doing your duty on such occasions, is the fear of offending an ignorant nurse or mother, who will think you a monster of cruelty for treating an infant so. Gentlemen, these persons do not know how difficult it is to get a child in convulsions to feel at all; and in proof of this, I may tell you, that such slaps as in a perfectly healthy child would be followed by marks that should last a week, in cases of this description leave no mark whatever after the paroxysm has ceased. During the fit, the child is so perfectly insensible as to be literally all but half-dead.

What is the present routine treatment of an infant taken with convulsive fits? That I can scarcely tell you; but when I settled in London, some six years ago, the COURT doctors, who, of course, gave the tone to the profession in the country, had no hesitation in applying all at once the eight lancets of the cupping instrument behind the ears of infants under six months old; and that, in some cases, repeatedly! In addition, they were in the habit of leeching, purging, and parboiling the poor little creatures to death in warm baths! If mothers will really suffer their children to be treated in this manner, surely they only deserve to lose them. The strongest and healthiest child in existence, far less a sick one, could scarcely survive the routine practice. And yet, whether you believe me or not, such fits are

seldom mortal,

Save when the doctor's sent for!

In my experience, it is only when the muscles of the wind-pipe become spasmodically involved, that you have any occasion to be anxious; asphyxia and sudden death being sometimes the result of such cases. In adult epilepsy, especially at the commencement of the fit, a very little thing will often at once produce a counter-movement of the brain, sufficiently strong to influence the body in a manner incompatible with its further continuance. The application of so simple a means as the ligature may then very often do this at once; but, like every other remedy frequently resorted to, it will be sure to lose its good effect, when the patient has become accustomed to it; for in this and similar cases, every thing depends upon the suddenness and unexpectedness of the particular measure put in practice, whether you influence the brain of a patient in a novel manner or not. The sudden cry of "fire" or "murder," nay, the unexpected singing of some old song, in a situation, or under circumstances which surprised the person who heard it, has charmed away a paroxysm of the severest pain. In the army, the unexpected order for a march or a battle will often empty an hospital. The mental excitement thereby produced, has cured diseases which had baffled all the efforts of the most experienced medical officers. In the words of Shakspeare, then, you may positively and literally

Fetter strong madness with a silken thread,
Cure ache with air, and agony with words!

LECTURE VII.

UNITY OF ALL THINGS DISEASES OF WOMEN-CANCER-TUMOUR-PREGNANCY PARTURITION-ABORTION TEETHING HEREDITARY PERIODICITY.

GENTLEMEN,

Many of you have, doubtless, read or heard of Dr. Channing of Boston, one of the boldest and most eloquent of American writers. In a little essay of his, entitled "Self-Culture," I find some observations bearing so strongly upon the subject of these lectures, that I cannot resist the temptation to read them at length. How far they go to strengthen the view I have thought it right to instil into your minds, you will now have an opportunity of judging for yourselves:-" Intellectual culture," says this justly eminent person, "consists, not chiefly, as many are apt to think, in accumulating information, though this is important; but in building up a force of thought which may be turned at will on any subjects on which we are forced to pass judgment. This force is manifested in the concentration of the attention; in accurate, penetrating observation; in reducing complex subjects to their elements; in diving beneath the effect to the cause; in detecting the more subtle differences and resemblances of things; in reading the future in the present; and especially in rising from particular facts to general laws or universal truths. This last exertion of the intellect, its rising to broad views and great principles, constitutes what is called a philosophical mind, and is especially worthy of culture. What it means, your own observation must have taught you. You must have taken note of two classes of men; the one always employed on details, on particular facts, and the other using these facts as foundations of higher, wider truths. The latter are philosophers. For example, men had for ages seen pieces of wood, stones, metals falling to the ground. NEWTON seized on these particular facts, and rose to the idea that all matter tends, or is attracted, towards all matter, and then defined the law according to which this attraction or force acts at different distances; thus giving us a grand principle, which we have reason to think extends to, and controls, the WHOLE outward CREATION. One man reads a history, and can tell you all its events, and there stops. Another combines these events, brings them under ONE VIEW, and learns the great causes which are at work on this or another nation, and what are its great tendencies, whether to freedom or despotism, to one or another form of civilisation. So one man talks continually about the particular actions of this or that neighbour, while another looks beyond the acts to the inward principle from which they spring, and gathers from them larger views of human nature. In a word, one man sees all things apart and in fragments, while another strives to discover the harmony, connexion, UNITY of ALL."

That such UNITY, Gentlemen, does actually and visibly pervade the whole subject of our own particular branch of science the history of human diseases, is a truth we have now, we hope, placed equally beyond the cavil of the captious and the interested. In this respect, indeed, we find it only harmonising with the history of every other thing in nature. But in making INTERMITTENT FEVER OR AGUE the type or emblem of this unity of disease, we must beg of you, at the same time, to keep constantly in view the innumerable diversities of shade and period, which different intermittent fevers may exhibit in their course. It has been said of faces,

Facies non omnibus una,

Nec diversa tamen

And the same may with equal truth be said of fevers; all have resemblances, yet all have differences. For, betwixt the more subtle and slight thermal

departures from health-those scarcely perceptible chills and heats, which barely deviate from that state-and the very intense cold and hot stages characteristic of an extreme fit of ague, you may have a thousand differences of scale or degree. Now, as it is only in the question of scale that all things can possibly differ from each other, so also is it in this that all things are found to resemble each other. The same differences of shade remarkable in the case of temperature may be equally observed in the motive condition of the muscles of particular patients. One man, for example, may have a tremulous, spasmodic, or languid motion of one muscle or class of muscles simply; while another shall experience one or other of these morbid changes of action in every muscle of his body. The chills, heats, and sweats, instead of being in all cases universal, may in many instances be partial only. Nay, in place of any increase of perspiration outwards, there may be a vicarious superabundance of some other secretion within; of this, you have evidence in the dropsical swelling, the diarrhoea, the bilious vomitings, and the diabetic flow of urine with which certain patients are afflicted. In such cases, and at such times, the skin is almost always dry. The same diversity of shade which you remark in the symptoms, may be equally observed in the period. The degree of duration, completeness, and exactness of both paroxysm and remission, differs with every case. The cold stage, which, in most instances, takes the patient first, in individual cases may be preceded by the hot. Moreover, after one or more repetitions of the fit, the most perfect ague may become gradually less and less regular in its paroxysms and periods of return; passing in one case into a fever apparently continued; in another, reverting by successive changes of shade into those happier and more harmonious alternations of temperature, motion, and period, which Shakspeare, with his usual felicity, figured as the "fitful fever" of healthy life. If you take health for the standard, every thing above or beneath it, whether as regards time, temperature, motion, or rest, is disease. When carefully and correctly analysed, the symptoms of such disease, to a physical certainty, will be found to resolve themselves into the symptoms or shades of symptom, of intermittent fever.— Fever, instead of being a thing apart from man, as your school doctrines would almost induce you to believe, is only an abstract expression for a greater or less change in the various revolutions of the matter of the body. FEVER and DISEASE, then, are ONE and IDENTICAL. They are neither "essences" to extract, nor "entities" to combat; they are simply variations in the phenomena of corporeal movements; and in most cases, happily for mankind, they may return to their normal state without the aid of physic or physicians.The same reparative power by which a cut or a bruise, in favourable circumstances, becomes healed, may equally enable every part of a disordered body to resume its wonted harmony of action. How often has nature in this way triumphed over physic, even in cases where the physician had been only too busy with his interference! It is in these cases of escape that the generality of medical men arrogate to themselves the credit of a cure.

It was a beautiful speculation of Parmenio," remarks Lord Bacon, "though but a speculation in him, that all things do by scale ascend to UNITY." Do I need to tell you, Gentlemen, that everything on this earth which can be weighed or measured is MATTER matter in one mode or another! What is the difference betwixt a piece of gold and a piece of silver of equal shape and size? A mere difference of degree of the SAME qualities-a different specific gravity, a different colour, a different ring, a different degree of malleability, a different lustre. But who in his senses would deny that these two substances approach nearer in their nature to each other than a piece of wood does to a stone; yet may not a piece of wood be petrified, be transformed into the very identical substance from which, at first sight, it so strikingly differs? Nay, may not the bones, muscles, viscera, and even the secretions of an animal body, by the same inscrutable chemistry of nature, be similarly transmuted into stone? Gold and silver have differences assuredly,

but have they not resemblances also; certain things in common, from which we deduce their unity, when we speak of thein both as metals? How much inore akin to each other in every respect are these substances than water is to either of its own elemental gases! What certainty, then, have you or I that both metals are not the same matter, only differing from each other in their condition or mode? Does not everything in turn change into something else; the organic passing into the inorganic, solids into liquids, liquids into gases, life into death, and vice versá? The more you reflect upon this subject, the more you must come to the opinion, that all things at last are only modes or differences of ONE MATTER. The unity of disease is admitted by the very opponents of the doctrine, when they give to apoplexy and toothache the same name-DISEASE or DISORDER. But these approaches to unity may be traced throughout every thing in nature. Betwixt the history of the human race, for example, the revolutions of empires, and the history of the individual man, the strongest relations of affinity may be traced. The corporeal revolutions of the body, like the revolutions of a kingdom, are a series of events. Time, space, and motion, are equally elements of both. "An analyst or a historian," says Hume, "who should undertake to write the History of Europe during any century, would be influenced by the connexion of time and place. All events which happen in that portion of space and period of time, are comprehended in his design, though, in other respects, different and unconnected. They have still a species of UNITY amid all their DIVERSITY.”

The LIFE OF MAN is a series of REVOLUTIONS. I do not at this moment refer to the diurnal and other minor movements of his body. I allude now to those greater changes in his economy, those climacteric periods, at which, certain organs that were previously rudimental and inactive, become successively developed. Such are the periods of teething and puberty, and the time when he attains to his utmost maturity of corporeal and intellectual power. The girl, the boy, the woman, the man, are all different, yet they are the same; for when we speak of MAN in the abstract, we mean all ages and both sexes. But betwixt the female and the male of all animals there is a greater degree of conformity or unity than you would at first suppose, and which is greatest in their beginning. Now, this harmonises with every thing else in nature; for all things in the beginning approach more nearly to simplicity. The early fatus of every animal, man included, has no sex; when sex appears, it is in the first instance hermaphrodite, just as we find it in the lowest tribe of adult animals-the oyster, for example. In this particular, as in every other, the organs of the human fœtus, internal as well as external, first come into existence in the lowest animal type; and it depends entirely upon the greater or less after development of these several hermaphroditic parts, whether the organs for the preservation of the race, take eventually the male or female form. How they become influenced to one or the other form we know not. Does it depend upon position? It must at any rate have a relation to temperature. For a long time even after birth, the breasts of the boy and the girl preserve the same appearance precisely. You can see that with your own eyes. But the comparative anatomist can point out other analogies, other equally close resemblances in the rudimental condition of the reproductive organs of both sexes. During the more early foetal state, the rudiments of the testes and ovaries are so perfectly identical in place and appearance, that you could not tell whether they should afterwards become the one or the other.What in the male becomes the prostate gland, in the female takes the form of the womb. To sum up all, the outward generative organs of both sexes are little more than inversions of each other. Every hour that passes, however, while yet in its mother's womb, converts more and more the unity of sex of the infant into diversity. But such diversity, for a long period, even after birth, is less remarkable than in adult life. How difficult at first sight to tell the sex of a child of two or three years old when clothed! at puberty, this difficulty has altogether vanished. Then the boy becomes bearded, and his

voice alters; then the breasts of the girl-which up to this period, in no respect different from his, in appearance at least become fully and fairly developed; assuming by gradual approaches the form necessary for the new function they must eventually perform in the maternal economy. Another, and a still greater revolution, embues them with the power of secreting the first nutriment of the infant. But even before the girl can become a mother a new secretion must have come into play; a secretion which, from its period being, unlike every other, monthly only, is known to physicians under the name of "Catamenia," or the "Menses." How can such things be done but by a great constitutional change, without a new febrile revolution of the whole body! Mark the sudden alternate pallor and flush of the cheek and lip, the tremors, spasms, and palpitations-to say nothing of the uncontrollable mental depressions and exaltations-to which the girl is then subject; and you will have little difficulty in detecting the type of every one of the numerous diseases to which she is then liable. Physicians may call them "Chlorosis," "green-sickness," or any other name; you, Gentlemen, will recognize in them the developments of an intermittent fever simply-as various in its shades, it is true, as a fever from any other cause may become-producing, like that, every wrong action of place and time you can conceive, and, like other fevers, often curing such wrong actions as previously existed, when it happens to reverse the atomic motions of the various parts of the body. Before touching upon the principal

DISEASES INCIDENTAL TO WOMEN,

I must tell you that the Catamenial secretion, in most cases, disappears during the period of actual pregnancy; nor does it return while the mother continues to give suck. During health, in every other instance, it continues from the time of puberty, or the period when women can bear children, to the period when this reproductive power ceases. As with a Fever it comes into play, so with a Fever it also takes its final departure. Why it should be a peculiarity of the human female, I do not know, but in no other animal has anything analogous been observed. Some authors, indeed, pretend to have seen it in the monkey; but if this were really the case, I do not think so many physiologists would still continue to doubt it, especially as they have every opportunity of settling the question definitively. Various speculations have been afloat as to the uses of this secretion, but I have never been satisfied of the truth of any of them. I am better pleased to know, that the more perfect the health, the more perfectly periodical the recurrence of the phenomenon. It is, therefore, without question, a Secretion, and one as natural and necessary to females of a certain age, as the saliva or the bile to all people in all times. How absurd, then, the common expression that a woman, during her period, is "unwell!" It is only when the catamenia is too profuse or too defective in quantity, or too frequent, or too far between in the period,-when the quality must also be correspondingly altered,—that the health is in reality impaired. Then, indeed, as in the case of other secretions imperfectly performed, pain may be an accompaniment of this particular function.

Need I tell you, that no female of a certain age can become the subject of any FEVER without experiencing more or less change in this catamenia? or that during any kind of indisposition, how slight soever it may be, some corresponding alteration in this respect must, with equal certainty, take place? In cases where the alteration thus produced takes the shape of a too profuse flow, practitioners are in the habit of prescribing astringents and cold applications. Happily for the patient, the medicines usually styled "Astringents,' (iron, bark, alum, opium, &c.,) are all CHRONO-THERMAL in their action; and the general salutary influence which they consequently exercise over the whole economy, very frequently puts the CATAMENIA, in common with every