curring in the persons of the victors, too often prove intractable, or even fatal to the vanquished! He might dissect their dead Nerves as clean as he pleased, and never find out that the living body of man may be either weakened or strengthened through the medium of his own Mind.* The depressing power of GRIEF is familiar to every body; but there are cases where a reverse effect may take place from it—and Shakspeare, with his usual accuracy explains the reason of this. In Poison there is Physic-and these news Having been WELL, that would have made me sick, And as the wretch, whose fever-weakened limbs, Out of his keeper's arms, even so my limbs, Weakened with Grief, being now Enraged with Grief, Are THRICE THEMSELVES. The strength imparted to the constitution in cases of this nature, has a relation to the novel atomic revolutions caused by DESPERATION; or that determination to act in an energetic manner, which so often comes upon a man in his extremity. Such reaction resembles the glow that succeeds the sudden shock of a cold shower-bath. There are persons whom a slow succession of petty misfortunes would worry to death; but who, on sudden and apparently overwhelming occasions, become heroes. It will be readily admitted, by all who have profited by their experience of life, that one-half the world live by taking advantage of the passions and prejudices of the other half. The parent of prejudice is ignorance; yet there is no man so ignorant but who knows something which you or I may not know. The wisest judges have played the fool sometimes from ignorance; they have allowed themselves to be gulled by individuals of a class they despise. Poor, decrepid, ill-educated females, calling themselves witches, have imposed upon the ablest and most learned men of a nation. Lord Bacon and Sir Mathew Hale believed in witchcraft; nay, the latter judge went on so far as to sentence to death wretches supposed to be convicted of it, and they were executed accordingly. Samuel Johnson was a believer in ghosts and the second sight. Where, then, is the country so enlightened that, upon some points, the wisest and best may not be mystified? If such a country exists, it must be England at the present moment; if there be a profession in which deception is never practised, it must be medicine. Happy England! happy medicine! where all is perfect and pure-where the public are neither cheated by an echo, nor led by a party for party interests! Here collegiate corruption is unknown, and corporate collusion is a mere name; here we have no diplomas or certificates to buy-no reviewers to bribe-no humbug schools -no venal professors; here, having no mote in our own medical eye, we can the better distinguish and pluck out that of our neighbours. Who will doubt our superiority in this respect over all other nations of the earth? Or who will question me in what that excellence principally consists? Scapegrace, sceptic, read Dr. Hawkins-read Dr. Bisset Hawkins' Continental Travels-and you will there find it recorded, that the brightest feature of British medicine-the most distinguished point of excellence in English treatment-is the copious blood-lettings we practice. "The neglect of copious blood-lettings," quoth Hawkins, "is the great error of the continental hospitals!" Let us laugh, then, at the do-little "médecine expectante” of the French, ridicule the do-nothing homoeopathy of the Germans, and turn up our lip in derision at the counter-stimulant doctrines of the Italians. What are the * The remarks in the text apply solely to the Morbid Anatomists-to those who argue from the end as if it were the beginning-not to the philosophical Comparative Anatomists, who, by comprehensively comparing the structure of one tribe of animals with another, have arrived at the Unity of Structure of all animals 66 greatest medical professors of the Continent, in comparison with our own meanest apothecaries even-to say nothing of our leading surgeons and physicians---presidents and vice-presidents of learned societies? Only look at the number of scientific bodies to which these little great men belong, you will find their names enrolled in every (so called!) Literary and Scientific institution throughout the country-astronomical, botanical, geological, antiquarian, royal! Amiable and respectable persons! worthy of the carriages in which you ride, and the arms you bear; you are gentlemen--friendly and disinterested gentlemen; you owe your elevation to your own industry; you preserve your position by your incorruptible honesty; you recommend yourselves, and each other, neither by letter nor affection, but upon the score of talent and integrity solely; you are all honourable men. Unlike the "honourable members" of a certain honourable place, who have been purchased, you, the members of an equally " honourable" profession, are unpurchasable! This, your colleges and coteries declare this, the discriminating world believes and echoes. Who but the reptiles-the few that never think, never reflect-would answer, ALL IS NOT GOLD THAT GLITTERS! Gentlemen, what is the difference betwixt a guinea and its counterfeit? Do not both sparkle with equal brightness? Have they not the same form, the same exterior impress? Can the eye detect the imposture? No! it is only by a comparative trial of their respective weight and ring, that you can make out the difference. Do you think mankind are to be judged in any other way than this? Is it not as necessary, for a person to be a successful cheat, that he should borrow the exterior of worth and integrity, as it is for the counterfeit guinea to bear the name and livery of the coin it purposes to be, before it can pass for genuine? Be not, then, satisfied with fine names and appearances only; do not take men for what they pretend to be solely by their manner or title, because they are doctors of this college, or professors of that university. What is a professorship but a place? "He who has the best talents for getting the office, has most commonly the least for filling it; and men are made moral [medical] and mathematical teachers, by the same trick and filthiness with which they are made tide-waiters and clerks of the kitchen."-Sydney Smith. Depend upon it, professors thus elected will always stand by each other-right or wrong, they will always support the same system. In this, they do no more than the members of the swell-mob, who work together by coterie and collusion. Like these professors, too, they are all very respectable in their appearance, some of them doing business in a carriage even!, Where is the individual that has not his moral as well as his physical weakness? Upon this point, at least, we are all liable to be overreached.Here we are every one of us imbecile as the infant; for we are placed as completely at the mercy of the Charlatan, as the child is at the disposal of the parent, whose mental ascendancy he acknowledges. Speak to the prattler of the "haunted chamber," his countenance instantly falls. With the adult, assume an air of mystery, mutter darkly and indefinitely, and mark how his brain will reel. Is he sane? he becomes your tool. Has he come to you in his sickness? you gull him and guide him at your pleasure. But how can you wonder at the effects of this kind of agency on individuals, when you have seen a whole nation similarly hood-winked by a coterie of doctors? allude to what was done when the cholera first appeared in England.— The influence of fear, in disposing to spread an epidemic, you know; the effect of confidence in strengthening the body against its attacks, you also know. What was the conduct of the College of Physicians when the cholera broke out? Did they try to allay the alarm of the masses? did they endeavour to inspire them with confidence and hope, that their bodies might be strengthened through their minds? No! they publicly, and by proclamation, declared the disease to be contagious; without a particle of proof, or the shadow of a shade of evidence, they solemnly announced that, like the small pox, it was communicable from man to man! That was the signal to get up their cholera boards; and cholera bulletins, forsooth, must be published. I had just then returned from India, where, though I had seen more cases of cholera than all the fellows of the college put together, I never heard of choleracontagion; no, nor cholera boards. In the far East, the authorities, civil, military, and medical, acted with firmness; what they could not arrest, they awaited with fortitude; they placed themselves and those committed to their care at the mercy of the great Disposer of Events; while in England, enlightened England, the leading law-givers, under the influence of the leading medical men, introduced acts that disgraced the statute-book, and permitted medical jobs to be got up that did anything but honour to the medical profession. A new tax was actually levied to defray the salaries of their cholera boards! The consequences of these measures might have been foreseen. Throughout the country universal panic was spread, and universal gloom prevailed. The rich shut themselves up in their houses, each in terror of his neighbour's touch; the middle classes suffered from the general stagnation which ensued in consequence; every trade, but the drug trade, languished or stood still; and the poor, when taken ill-for the disease was chiefly confined to that classwere, by act of parliament, dragged from their homes, and conveyed to the cholera hospitals, where, if they did not perish of the prostration induced by their removal, they had salt and water injected into their veins by the medical mad-men in charge! De barred the society of their nearest and dearest relatives, and tortured in every possible way by their pedantic doctors, how few of these unfortunates escaped from the pest-houses in which they were so inhumanly immured! All this, the leading men of the country, peers, judges, and members of parliament, saw and permitted, from a puerile dread of the phantom contagion, which the ignorance or cupidity of the College of Physicians had conjured up. To what miseries will not the feeble submit, when under the influence of intimidation, if Even the wisest and the hardiest quail To any goblin hid behind a veil ! Is not this a subject for deep reflection? To some it may suggest a feeling like shame. Let me speak of SHAME. Generally speaking, this is a depressing passion, and under its influence men sometimes, and women daily, commit suicide. I will give you an instance where it had the reverse effect. The girls of Miletus, a town in Greece, were seized with a mania that led them to believe self-destruction an act of heroism; and many accordingly destroyed themselves. Physic and argument having been alike ineffectually tried, the authorities, to prevent the spread of this fatal rage, ordered the bodies of the suicides to be dragged naked through the streets of the city. From that moment the mania ceased. But everything depends upon a contingency, whether a particular passion act as a depressant or a tonic in disease. In the case of Shame, the past and the future make a great deal of difference. Some of you may, perhaps, feel inclined to remind me of the efficacy of Fear in the Cure of diseases; but in this case the fear induced must neither be a dread of the disease nor its event, but a dread of some circumstance completely unconnected with it. Thus, Sir John Malcom, in his History of Persia, tells us of a certain Hakeem who cured ague by the bastinado. In this case the Persian doctor availed himself of the double influence of fear and pain, neither of which was contingent upon the disease. The effect of Terror in removing tooth-ache is familiar to many who have knocked at a dentist's door. The gout, too, has been cured and caused by every passion you can name. There does not pass a day but we hear of people being frightened into epileptic fits; yet Boerhaave terrified away an epilepsy from a school where it prevailed, by threatening to burn with a red-hot poker the first boy that should have another paroxysm. I have known asthma cured by Rage. and also by Grief; yet, if we may believe what we hear, people occasionally choke of both! Few medical men will dispute the influence of a passion in the cure of Ague. Mention any mental impression, such as Faith, Fear, Rage, or Joy, as having succeeded in this affection, and they doubt it not; but superadd to the patient's state a palpable change of volume, or structure, such as an enlarged gland or ulcer, and they smile in derision at the efficacy of a charm. Extremes in scepticism and credulity are equally diseases of the mind. The healthy brain is ever open to conviction; and he who can believe that the Obi-charm, or the magic of a monarch's touch, can so operate on the nervous system as to interrupt or avert the mutations of motion and temperature constituting an ague-fit, should pause before he deny their influence over an ulcer or a tumor, which can only be developed or removed by or with change of temperature. Indeed, from what we have already said, it is impossible for any individual to be the subject of any mental impression without experiencing a chill or a heat, a tremor or a spasm, with a greater or less change in the atomic relations of every organ and secretion. Baron Alibert gives the case of a Parisian lady, who had a large wen in the necka goître-which, from its deformity, occasioned her much annoyance. tumor, which had resisted every variety of medical treatment, disappeared during the Reign of Terror-a period when this lady, like many others of her rank, experienced the greatest mental agony and suspense. The agony and suspense in that case referred to a contingency altogether unconnected with her disease. The mere act of dwelling upon sickness will keep it up; while whatever withdraws the mind from it is beneficial. In my own experience, abscesses of considerable magnitude have been cured both by fear and joy. Few surgeons in much practice have been without the opportunity of satisfying themselves that purulent swellings may recede under the influence of fear. They have assured themselves of the presence of matter-they propose to open the tumor-the frightened patient begs another day, but on the morrow it has vanished. That Akin to Terror is DISGUST, or that feeling which a person naturally entertains when, for the first time, he handles a toad or an asp. This passion has worked wonders in disease. The older physicians took advantage of it in their prescriptions; for they were very particular in their directions how to make broth of the flesh of puppies, vipers, snails, and milipedes! The celebrated Mohawk Chief, Joseph Brandt, while on a march, cured himself of a tertian ague, by eating broth make from the flesh of a rattlesnake! Here the cure must have been altogether the effect of disgust, for in reality the flesh of a rattlesnake is as perfectly innocuous, and quite as nutritious as the flesh of an eel. Mr. Catlin, in his Letters and Notes on the North American Indians, tells us that when properly broiled and dressed he found the rattlesnake to be "the most delicious food of the land." But when you come to think of the living reptile and the venom of his fang, who among you could at first feed upon such fare without shuddering, shivering, shaking-without, in a word, experiencing the horrors and horripulations of ague! Spider-web, soot, moss from the dead man's skull, the touch of a dead malefactor's hand, are at this very hour remedies with the English vulgar for many diseases. With the Romans the yet warm blood of the newly-slain gladiator was esteemed for its virtues in epilepsy. Even at this day, in some countries of Europe, the lower orders cure the same disorder by drinking the blood as it flows from the neck of the decapitated criminal. In the last century, a live toad hung round the neck was much esteemed, by the same class of people, for its efficacy in stopping bleeding at the nose. Now that the toad is known to be free from venom, it might not be so successful as it once was in this instance. Any temporary benefit, real or supposed, which has accrued from the employment of the Leech, has appeared to me to be in many instances the effect of the Horror the patient very naturally entertained for the reptile. A consideration of the power by which the Passions cure and cause dis eases, affords at once the best refutation of medical error, and the most perfect test of medical truth. By this test, I am willing that my doctrines should stand or fall. What are the Passions? Cerebral moyements--actions of the internal BRAIN, produced by external causes-which, by influencing its atomic revolutions, influence every right or wrong action of the body. Take the influence of Fear simply-what disease has not this passion caused ?— what has it not cured?-inducing right motions in one case, wrong in another. The mode of action of a passion, then, establishes beyond cavil not only the unity of disease, but the unity of action of remedy and cause. What does the proper treatment of all diseases come to at last, but to the common principle of reversing the existing motion and temperature of various parts of the body? Do this in a diseased body, and you have health-do the same in health, and you reproduce disease. Whatever will alter the movements of a living being will cure or cause disease. This, then, is the mode in which all our remedies act. Just observe the effect of BATHS. In what disease have not Baths been recommended?-and in what manner can they cure or ameliorate, but by change of temperature-by change of motion? Put your hand into ice-water-does it not shrink and become diminished in size? Place it in water as hot as you can bear-how it swells and enlarges! You see, then, that change of temperature necessarily implies change of motion; and that change of motion produces change of temperature, you have only to run a certain distance to be satisfied; or you may save yourself the trouble, by looking out of your window in a winter morning, when you will see the hackney coachmen striking their breasts with their arms to warm themselves. Depend upon it they would not do that for nothing. Heat, then, so far from being itself a material substance, as Black and other chemists assert, is a mere condition of matter in motion—it is no more a substance than colour, sound, or fluidity. What can be greater nonsense than an "imponderable" substance-as Heat and Light have been sometimes called? That only is MATTER or SUBSTANCE which can be weighed and measured—and this may be done with invisible as well as visible things,—in the case of a Gas for example; however attenuated, a gas can both be weighed and measured. I am often asked, what baths are safest, as if everything by its fitness or unfitness is not safe, or the reverse. The value of all baths depends upon their fitness; and that, in many instances, can only be known by trial. It depends upon constitution, more than upon the name of a disease, whether particular patients shall be benefitted by one Bath or another. Generally speaking, when the skin is hot and dry, a Cold Bath will do good; and when chilly, a Hot Bath. But the reverse sometimes happens. The cold stage of Ague, may at once be cut short by a cold bath. I have seen a shivering hypochondriac dash into the cold plunge bath, and come out in a minute or two perfectly cured of all his aches and whimsies. But in cases of this nature, every thing depends upon the glow or reaction, which the Bath produces; and that has as much to do with surprise or shock as with the temperature of the bath. I have seen a person, with a hot dry skin, go into a warm bath, and come out just as refreshed as if he had taken a cold one. In that case the perspiration which it excited must have been the principal means of relief. So far as my own experience goes, I prefer the cold and tepid showerbaths, and the cold plunge bath to any other; but there are cases in which these disagree, and I, therefore, occasionally order the warm or vapour bath instead. In diseases termed "inflammatory," what measure so ready or so efficacious as to dash a pitcher or two of cold water over the patient-Cold Affusion, as it is called? Whilst serving in the Army, I cured hundreds of inflam |