sion, was Le Sage-"Death," says he, "has two wings; on one are painted war, plague, famine, fire, shipwreck, with all the other miseries that every instant offer him a new prey. On the other wing you behold a crowd of young physicians about to take their degree before him. Death proceeds to dub them doctors, (leur donne de bonnet,) having first made them swear never in any way to alter the established practice of physic."

The established practice of physic! Who could possibly think of altering it? Altering perfection! According to every professor in every university where medicine is studied, there is no science so glorious-so Godlike! Outside the walls of the schools, it is true, you occasionally hear people speaking against it. Gentlemen, take no heed of such unbelievers! What could persons like Molière, or Rousseau, or Le Sage, know of an art they were never bred to? That the Great Frederick all his life laughed at medical men, is nothing remarkable. A man who, in one day, had killed more than all the doctors in Europe could do in a month, might well be excused his laugh. On that score, too, we pardon Napoleon, who expressed a similar contempt for medicine. But the Prince de Ligne, though a wit as well as a warrior, is not to be forgiven so easily. With all their professed scorn, Frederick and Napoleon, when sick, took physic. Not so the Prince de Ligne: when attacked with fever he had the presumption to thank Heaven he had no doctor near him; and he actually attributed his recovery to his good fortune in that respect! If ever a man deserved death, it was that Prince de Ligne, for giving Nature the trouble of curing his fever, without once calling in the Baillie or Halford of his day to assist! The misfortune is, this unbelieving spirit is not confined to the continent. Locke, Smollett, Goldsmith, (all three physicians,) held their art in contempt. Swift, Temple, Hume, Adam Smithto say nothing of Byron, Hazlitt, and other contemporaries-were equally severe on its professors. Byron, indeed, anathematised it as "the destructive art of healing;" and when writing to a friend the details of a fever from which he had suffered, in something like the vein of the Prince de Ligne, he tells him, "I got well by the blessings of barley-water, and refusing to see my physician!" Gentlemen, do you think that all these remarkable persons were inferior in observation and reflection, to the herd of doctors and apothe

caries who swarm in these times ?

But so completely at variance with each other are even the greatest medical authorities on every subject in medicine, that I do not know a single disease in which you will find any two of them agreeing. Take the subject of Pulmonary Consumption, for example; The celebrated Stohl attributed the frequency of consumption to the introduction of the Peruvian bark. The equally celebrated Morton considered the bark an effectual cure. Reid ascribed its frequency to the use of mercury. Brillonet asserted that it is only curable by this mineral. Rush says, that consumption is an inflammatory disease, and should be treated by bleeding, purging, cooling medicines, and starvation. With a greater show of reason, Salvadori maintained the disease to be one of debility, and that it should be treated by tonics, stimulating remedies, and a generous diet. Galen, among the ancients, recommended vinegar as the best preventive of consumption. Dessault, and other modern writers, assert that consumption is often brought on by a common practice of young people taking vinegar to prevent their getting fat. Dr. Beddoes recommended foxglove as a specific in consumption. Dr. Parr, with equal confidence, declared that he found foxglove more injurious in his practice than beneficial! Now, what are we to infer from all this? Not as some of you might be tempted to believe, that the science is deceptive or incomprehensive thoughout, but that its professors to this very hour have neglected to make themselves acquainted with the true principles upon which remedies act, and know as little of the true nature of the diseases whose treatment they so confidently undertake. And what is the daily, the hourly result of this terrible ignorance and uncertainty? In the words of Frank,

"Thousands are slaughtered in the quiet sick room." "Governments,” continues the same physician, "should at once either banish medical men and their art, or they should take proper means that the lives of people may be safer than at present, when they look far less after the practice of this dangerous profession, and the murders committed in it, than after the lowest trades. "

"If false facts," says Lord Bacon, "be once on foot, what through neglect of examination, the countenance of antiquity, and the use made of them in discourse, they are scarce ever retracted." The late Professor Gregory scrupled not to declare in his class-room, that ninety-nine out of every hundred medical facts were so many medical lies, and that medical doctrines were for the most part little better than stark-staring nonsense;—and this, Gentlemen, we shall have some amusement in proving to you. In the mean time, I may observe, that nothing can more clearly explain the difficulties which beset the student of physic-for who can understand nonsense, and, when clothed in phrases which now admit one sense, now another, what so difficult to refute? "Nothing," says Sir Humphrey Davy, "has so much checked the progress of philosophy, as the confidence of teachers in delivering dogmas as truths which it would be presumptuous to question. It was this spirit which for more than ten centuries, made the crude physics of Aristotle the natural philosophy of the whole of Europe. It was this spirit which produced the imprisonment of the elder Bacon and the recantation of Galileo. It is this spirit, notwithstanding the example of the second Bacon assisted by his reproof, his genius, and his influence, which has, even in later times, attached men to imaginary systems,-to mere abstracted combinations of words, rather than to the visible and living world; and which has often induced them to delight more in brilliant dreams than in beautiful and grand realities."

Imposed upon by these abstracted combinations of words, we find it difficult to divest ourselves of the erroneous and mystical distinctions by which our teachers have too often endeavoured to conceal their own ignorance:-for in the "physical sciences,"I again quote Sir Humphrey Davy,-“ there are much greater obstacles in overcoming old errors, than in discovering new truths-the mind in the first case being fettered; in the last, perfectly free in its progress." "To say that any class of opinions shall not be impugned -that their truth shall not be called in question, is at once to declare that these opinions are infallible and that their authors cannot err. What can be more egregiously absurd and presumptuous? It is fixing bounds to human, knowledge, and saying men cannot learn by experience-that they can never be wiser in future than they are to-day. The vanity and folly of this is sufficiently evinced by the history of religion and philosophy. Great changes have taken place in both, and what our ancestors considered indisputable truths, their posterity discovered to be gross errors. To continue the work of improvement, no dogmas, however plausible, ought to be protected from investigation."

In the early history of every people, we find the priest exercising the functions of the physician. Looking upon the throes of disease as the workings of devils, his resource was prayer and exorcism; the maniac and epileptic were termed by him demoniacs, and when a cure was accomplished, the demon was said to be cast out. Even now, the traces of clerical influence on our art are not extinct in England; for though our churchmen have long ceased to arrogate to themselves the exclusive right, as well as the exclusive power of healing, an Archbishop of Canterbury is still permitted, by the laws of his country, to confer degrees in physic! nor does he fail even in these days to avail himself occasionally of his prerogative.

We are told by the ingenious John Brown that he "wasted more than twenty years in learning, teaching, and diligently scrutinising every part of medicine. The first five passed away in hearing others, studying what he

had heard, implicitly believing it, and entering upon the possession as a rich and valuable inheritance. His mode of employment the next five years was to explain more clearly the several particulars, to refine and give them a nicer polish. During the next equal space of time, because no part of it had succeeded to his mind, he became cold upon the subject, and with many eminent men, even with the vulgar themselves, began to deplore the healing art as altogether uncertain and incomprehensible. All this time passed away without the acquisition of any advantage, and of that which of all things is most agreeable to the mind-the light of truth; and so great, so precious a portion of the fading and short-lived age of man was lost. It was only betwixt the fifteenth and twentieth year of his studies that, like a traveller in an unknown country, wandering in the shade of night, after losing every trace of his road, a very obscure gleam of light, like that of the first break of day, dawned upon him."

Gentlemen, it was my fortune to be more early staggered with the inadequacy of received doctrines either to explain Disease or cure it. I therefore determined to read anew the Book of Ñature, and study it by the light of such common sense as God in his goodness had given me, rather than trust any longer to the reports of fallacious commentators. To this investigation I came with a different spirit from that with which I entered the schools of physics. In my noviciate I yielded implicit faith to my teachers; in my later researches after truth, I have often had to guard myself as much against a too rigorous scepticism of their facts as a too great contempt of their opinions. With Lord Bolingbroke, I can truly say, "few men have consulted others, both the living and the dead, with less presumption, and in a greater spirit of docility than I have done; and the more I have consulted the less I have found of that inward conviction on which a mind that is not absolutely implicit can rest. I thought for a time that this must be my fault; I distrusted myself, not my teachers-men of the greatest name, ancient and modern; but I found at last it was safer to trust myself than them, and to proceed by the light of my own understanding, than to wander after these ignus fatui of philosophy."

After a long and diligent scrutiny of Nature in this spirit, I have at last been enabled to place before the profession a Doctrine of Disease, and a Method of Cure, which, when the unity of principle of the one and the universality of application of the other have been fairly tested, will tend, I hope, to rescue physic and physicians from the obloquy and contempt with which the more thinking part of the public have too long looked upon both.

In the course of these Lectures, gentlemen, it shall be my business to prove to you the UNITY or INDENTITY of all morbid action, and the unity and identity of the source of power of the various agencies by which disease of every kind may be caused or cured. "The universe," says D'Alembert, "to him who should have sufficient comprehension to behold it at a single view, would only appear one great fact-one mighty truth." And in the same spirit Sir James M'Intosh observes, "the comprehensive understanding discovers the IDENTITY of facts which seem dissimilar, and binds together into a system the most apparently unconnected and unlike results of experience." Beware, then, of differences-of division; for as Lord Bacon well observes, "divisions only give us the husks and outer parts of a science, while they allow the juice and kernel to escape in the splitting." And from this you may learn not only the absurdity of nosological distinctions, but also the utter nothingness and vanity of the many disputes that daily occur in practice, whether disorders resembling each other, and amenable to the same treatment, should be called by one name or another. In the language of Hobbes, "words are wise men's counters,-they do but reckon by them; but they are the money of fools, that value them by the authority of an Aristotle, a Cicero, a Thomas Aquinas, or any other doctor whatsoever." More than twenty-three centuries have elapsed since Hippocrates dis

tinctly announced the Unity of Morbid Action,—Omnium morborum unus et idem modus est." THE TYPE OF ALL DISEASE IS ONE AND IDENTICAL. These are his words, and that is my case. That is the cause I am prepared to enter upon with as perfect a chain of positive and circumstantial proof in its support as ever was offered to human investigation. Gentlemen, what Johnson said of poets is equally applicable to physicians: "The first, whoever they be, must take their sentiments and descriptions immediately from knowledge their descriptions are verified by every eye, and their sentiments acknowledged by every breast. Those whom their fame invites to the same studies copy partly them and partly nature, till the books of one age gain such authority as to stand in the place of nature to another." It is in this manner that the descriptions of disease in our nosological systems have become a mere tissue of unnatural division, not to say of the most obvious contradiction; if the words in which they be conveyed have, in many instances, any meaning at all. What, then, shall we say of reasoning founded upon facts which are no facts-upon mere assumptions which have no foundation in nature !

The schools of Egypt and Arabia, the eminent men of Greece and Rome, the great anatomical teachers and philosophers of the middle ages, knew not the circulation of the blood. How wild were their theories, how fanciful their hypotheses, may be gleaned from the fact of their naming certain bloodvessels, arteries, or air-vessels; tubes, which you have only to wound to see them pour out the living current in jets, were for ages supposed to contain A not blood, but air! What innumerable fallacies must have entered into reasoning founded on such premises! Yet it was not till the seventeenth century that the illustrious Harvey demonstrated the true nature of the arteries, and the manner in which the blood circulates through the body. The more immediate reward of his discovery was calumny, misrepresentation, and loss of his professional practice. The same College of Physicians who, in after years, opposed the improvements of Montague and Jenner, made the Circulation of the Blood the subject of their bitterest satire. Not content with slandering the character of its discoverer, the more vile and venal of his medical brethren made it a pretext for declining to meet him in consultation. Harvey lived, nevertheless, to neutralise the malice of his enemies; he became successively the physician of the first two English kings of the Stuart race, James and Charles."

The more you can explain and facilitate the attainment of any science, the more you will find that science approach perfection. The true philosopher has always studied to find out relations and resemblances in nature, thus simplifying the apparently wonderful;-the schools, on the contrary, have as invariably endeavoured to draw fine-spun distinctions and differences, the more effectually to perplex and make the most simple things difficult of access. "In universities and colleges," says Lord Bacon, “men's studies are almost confined to certain authors, from which if any dissenteth or propoundeth matter of redargution, it is enough to make him be thought a person turbulent. Any exposition of the singleness of principle which pervades a particular science, will be sure to meet the censure of schools and colleges; nor will their disciples always forgive you for making that easy which they themselves, after years of study, have declared to be incomprehensible.

The most perfect system has ever been allowed to be that which can reconcile and bring together the greatest number of facts that come within the sphere of the subject of it. In this consists the sole glory of Newton, whose discovery rests upon no higher order of proof. How was this discovery received upon its first announcement? In the words of Dr. Chalmers, "authority scowled upon it; and taste was disgusted by it; and fashion was ashamed of it; and all the beauteous speculation of former days was cruelly broken up by this new announcement of the better philosophy, and scattered like the fragments of an aërial vision over which the past generations of the

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world had been slumbering their profound and pleasing reveries." For upwards of ten centuries had the false prophesy of Aristotle enslaved the minds of civilised Europe, thus at last to perish and pass away! So that Time itself is no sure test of a doctrine, nor ages of ignorance any standard by which to measure a system. To Nature, eternal Nature, must Truth ever make her first and last appeal. By this, and this only, am I willing that the new fabric of medicine which I have presumed to erect upon the ruins and reveries of the past, should be tested and tried. Till the world shall detect one real-one indubitable fact militating against the Views I am now about to develope, let not innovation be charged against me as a crime Hippocrates, Galen, Boerhaave, Cullen, were all innovators in their day, nay, revolutionists in physic. The revolution I meditate, unlike those of some of my predecessors, is at least free from the imputation of being either painful or sanguinary in its character. The only agents it rejects are the leech, the bleeding lancet, and the cupping instrument. Let us now enter upon the developement of this NEW, but NATURAL SYSTEM.

Gentlemen, in the higher powers of Observation, Comparison, Comprehension, and Direction, termed Mind or Intellect, Man stands pre-eminent above all animals; in so far as regards the more immediate observation of certain things around him, he is nevertheless excelled in some respects by many. The eagle has a finer and farther sight; the hearing of the mole is more acute; the dog and the vulture distinguish odours wholly inappreciable by him; not a few of the wilder denizens of the forest have even a keener sense of taste and touch. In mere perceptive power, then, the beasts of the field are in some things permitted to surpass us; while the sagacity of the elephant and the dog, the courage and emulation of the horse, the foresight of the ant, the cunning of the fox, and the social and building habits of the beaver, declare to us-however unpleasing the announcement-that others of God's creatures besides ourselves, possess the elements, at least, of that REASON, upon which we so highly pride ourselves. To the greater degree of complexity, perhaps I should rather say completeness, of his CEREBRAL organization,—to his more perfect developement of that source of all reasoning power, the BRAIN,- -man assuredly owes this corresponding increase in the number and force of his reasoning faculties. The more complete mechanism of his prehensible organ, the HAND, gives him the power to execute what his HEAD conceives, in a degree of perfectibility that we look for in vain in the works of any other tribe of the animal kingdom. Look at "man's full fair front;" it is a superadded—not a superfluous part; the more it diminishes and recedes, the nearer you will find its possessor to be akin to the brute.

But, gentlemen, the rudiments of every portion of this instrument of man's reasoning faculties, this directing Brain, variously developed, may be detected in almost every link of the great chain of animated beings of which he is confessedly the chief. To every variety of race that animates the globe, whether in external or internal configuration, we have undeniably many features of relationship; nor let us spurn even the meanest and most shapeless as beneath our notice for of every organic production of their common Maker, Man, while yet in the womb of his parent, has been the type !—his foetal form successively partaking of the nature of the worm, fish, and reptile, and rapidly traversing still higher gradations in the scale of organised existence, to burst at last upon the view in all the fulness and fairness of the perfect infant. But it is not in his outward form, only, that he passes through these various gradations of animal life. From Comparative Anatomy we also learn that each of his separate internal organs, on first coming into fœtal existence, assumes the lowest type of the same organ in the animal kingdom; and it is only by successive periodic transformations that it gradually approaches to the degree of completeness in which we find it in the new-born child. The heart of the embryo-infant is a mere canal, nearly straight at