or crudity to be expelled, nor any fanciful chemical goblin to be chemically neutralised;-neither is the state erroneously termed inflammation, so commonly the cause as a coincident part of general disorder. Disease is an error of action-a greater or less variation in the motion, rest, and revolutions of the different parts of the body-reducible, like the revolutions of Health, into a systematic series of periodic alternations. Whatever be the cause or causes of corporeal aberration, in obedience to the law of all matter, the first effects are change of motion and change of temperature. The patient accordingly has a feeling of heat or cold. His muscular movements less under the control of their respective influences, become tremulous, spasmodic; or wearied, palsied, the functions of particular muscles cease. The breathing is hurried on slight exertion; or it is maintained slowly and at intervals, and with a long occasional inspiration and expiration-familiar to you all in the act of sighing. The heart is quick, palpitating; or languid, or remittent in its beats; the appetite craving, capricious, or lost. The secretions are either hurried and increased in quantity; or sluggish, or suppressed. The body shows a partial or general waste; or becomes in part or in whole preternaturally tumid and bloated. Alive to the slightest stimulus, the patient is easily impassioned or depressed; his mind, comprehending in its various relations every shade of unreasonable sadness or gaiety, prodigality or cupidity, vacillation or pertinacity, suspicious caution or too confident security; with every colour of imagination, from highly intellectual conception to the dream-like vagaries and reveries of hallucination. His sensations are perceptibly diminished or increased. Light and sound, for example, confuse or distract him; like the soft Sybarite, a ruffled rose-leaf frets him. With the smallest increase in the medium temperature of the atmosphere, he becomes hot and uncomfortable, and the slightest breeze shivers and discomposes him; or, as you may sometimes observe in the case of extreme age or idiocy, he becomes equally insensible to excess of light, sound, heat, and cold.

Contrast, if you please, these simpler forms of DISEASE with what we have said of HEALTH, and you will at a glance perceive that the difference betwixt the two states consists in mere variation of the sum or amount of particular corporeal motions, and in a difference of effect of external agency on the matter and functions of the body. Structural change, or tendency to decomposition of any part of the frame, so frequently but erroneously associated with disease as a cause, is not even a necessary element in a fatal result. What are Toothache, Consumption, Rheumatism, but developments of constitutional change?—they are phenomena which may or may not arise out of general corporeal disturbance, according to particular habits and predisposition. By predisposition, I mean the readiness or fitness of one part of the body more than another to be acted upon by influences from without,-occasioned by a weakness in the cohesive power of the atoms of that part to each other. We have all our particular predispositions.

Let us now inquire into the

Gentlemen, the Causes of all these various diseases-VARIOUS in name,

place, and, degree-ONE only in their real nature-may be found either in a deprivation or wrong adaptation of the identical forces which continue Life in health,-the same natural agencies, in a word, by which every motion or event is produced throughout the universe. They comprise, therefore, everything that connects us, directly or indirectly, with the external world; and most, if not all of them, act upon us, in the first place, through the different modifications of nervous perception. The causes of disease, then, never originate in any one organ of the body,-except in so far as that organ may be predisposed by an inherent weakness of the attractive power of the atoms of its parts, to receive grave impressions from outward agencies that affect the more stable portions of the same body in a slighter manner. I conceive with Hobbes, that, "nothing taketh beginning from itself, but from the action of some immediate agent without itself." If this be true, how delusive the idea of those professors who look for the Causes of disease in the bodies of the dead! In the schools we constantly hear that Anatomy is the foundation of medical science. Sydenham, on the contrary, held it so cheap. as to say, "Anatomy is a fit study for painters ;"-he might have added, and also for surgeons; but so far as Medicine is concerned, the best anatomists have been seldom good physicians. They have been all too mechanical in their notions. Do not, Gentlemen, for a moment suppose I mean to condemn the study of Anatomy, or that I would desire to leave it out in any system of medical education. Cultivated in a proper spirit, I would rather, on the contrary, make it a part of the useful education of the people. By surgeons Anatomy must be studied minutely, and few men in these days would care to practise Physic without possessing a competent knowledge of the various organs of the body on which medicines operate. But let the student keep in mind that a dead body is one thing and a living_body another—and that a man may know anatomy as well as the best professor who ever taught it, and yet be utterly ignorant what medicines to prescribe if he wished to alter the motions of any one organ of a living body. To Physic, anatomy is a mere accessary-and the Physicians of some countries, India and China for example, practise their profession with wonderful success, though they never saw the inside of a dead body. Sydenham is called to this day the English Hippocrates, and yet you have seen how little he prized anatomy.—And, certainly, in his own words, it is a knowledge "easily and soon attained, and it may be shortened more than other things that are more difficult, for it may be learned by sight in human bodies, or in some animals, and that very easily, by such as are not sharp-witted," [meaning, thereby, that any blockhead with a tolerable memory may easily master it.] "But in acute diseases," he continues, "which kind contains more than two-thirds of diseases; and moreover, in most chronic complaints, it must be confessed there is some specific property" [depending, as I shall afterwards show you, on the electrical condition of the living brain,]" which no contemplation deduced from the speculation of the [dead] human body can ever discover:wherefore, that men should not so place the main of the business upon the dissection of carcasses, as if thereby the medical art might be rather promoted, than by the diligent observation of the natural phenomena, and of such things as do good and hert," the action of medicine, for example, and other external agency upon the living. How different this from the language of Dr. Baillie, who' says, "The dead body is that great basis on which we are to build the knowledge that is to guide us in distributing life and health to our fellowcreatures!" Here, then, so far as mere authority goes, you have the opinions of two celebrated men in direct opposition. But in the course of these lectures, I will give you something better than any human authority, however respectable.

The too exclusive spirit in which professor havs urged the necessity of investigating the bodies of the dead, not in England only, but throughout Europe, has given rise to a class of medical materialists, who, hoping to find

the origin of every disease made manifest by the scalpel, are ever mistaking effects for causes. Loth to believe that death may take place without even a palpable change of structure, these individuals direct their attention to the minutia of the dead-and finding, in their search, some petty enlargement, some trifling ulceration, or, it may be, some formidable tumor or abscess, hastily set this down as the first cause of a general disease of which it was only a development or coincident part. "These people," in the words of the late Dr. Uwins, "put consequence for cause, incident for source, change in the condition of blood vessels for powers producing such change. It is an error which has its origin in the blood and filth of the dissecting-room, and which tends to degrade medicine from the dignity of a science to the mere detail of an art." What has practical medicine gained at the hands of anatomical professors? The greater number of their pupils have been sceptics in Physic; and no wonder, since they have been so constantly accustomed to hear, ex cathedrá, that anatomy is the foundntion of all medical science. That were true enough, if by the word "foundation" be meant that anatomy is the lowest part of it. The fact is, this kind of language is the natural result of a too great preponderance of Surgical influence in the schools. It is the effect of a too great influence of your "great operators,"―tending to make young men expert anatomical mechanics, but nothing more. These leave their universities, not only with a contempt for Physic, but without a single correct idea of the action of medicine on the living system; and yet to these the people of this country chiefly entrust the treatment of their diseases, which, in ninety-nine cases out of the hundred, demand medical, not surgical knowledge for their cure. Beware, then, of trusting to great operators, to men whose art Shakspeare truly says has "no honour in it,”—for were Physic better cultivated, there would be little need of such an opprobrium in medicine as operative mutilation. It is an art, too, that blunts the feelings and inclines its professors too often to use the knife more to gratify their own love of display, than to give relief te their suffering fellow-creatures. No "great operator" should be permitted to perform any capital operation without the previous consent of one or more physicians. In its present mechanical and degraded state, who can wonder that those who practise Medicine should so frequently cut the sorry figures they do when examined as witnesses in our courts of law, or that their evidence in most instances should appear to both the Bench and Bar a tissue of incoherency and inconsistency throughout? At an inquest, medical practitioners seldom get beyond the appearances of a post mortem examination, though in a great many instances such appearances, as I shall afterwards show you, have been produced by their own bad practice! It is somewhat strange that their too numerous opportunities of dissecting dead bodies should not long ago have opened their eyes to their paucity of resource for the ailments of the living! So great and universal has the prevalent delusion upon the subject of dissection become, that almost everybody, from the peer to the peasant, shares in it. Lord Brougham, in a speech he once made, declared that "the only good medical education is to be got in the dissecting-room." The same nobleman, in his work on Natural Theology, speculates upon the power of MIND apart from MATTER; proving himself to be equally superficial in mental as in medical science. But what advantages, let me ask, have centuries of dissection contributed to the healing art? We hear of a great many, truly; but lungs decomposed, livers enlarged, bone, muscle, and intestine in various stages of corruption, would seem to comprise the whole. These are nevertheless what modern professors put up in bottles and cases, and exultingly show off as "beautiful specimens!" "superb collections!" pointing them out at the same time to their credulous pupils as the trophies of science, when they might better describe them as the triumphs of death over their own want of skill; or,—in the words of Gray,

"Rich windows that exclude the light,
And passages that lead to nothing!"

Now, what has the most patient study of these done for Physic? has it given us one new remedy, or told us better how to use our old? Where were the virtues of bark and opium ascertained? In the dead house? No, certainly! The one was discovered by a Peruvian peasant who cured himself of the ague by it: what had anatomy to do with that? For the other

we may thank the Brahmins of Hindustan, who hold the dissecting-room in horror. Antimony, rhubarb, mercury,-whence got we our knowledge of these?-From the quack and the old woman-individuals who will ever successfully compete with physicians, while the latter busy themselves with dead bodies, to the neglect of the powers and principles that affect the living. "A cripple in the right way," says Lord Bacon, "will beat a racer in the wrong." So great a stumbling-block to a proper knowledge of medicine has been this exclusive and too minute attention to dissection, that Dr. Baillie, its greatest patron, after retiring from practice, confessed, as I have already told you, his total want of faith in physic. The experience of his whole life was equally a satire on anatomical knowledge, and the value too often attaching to a medical reputation.

To return to the CAUSES of disease, are they not infinite? The seasons and the sidereal influences; the earth and its emanations; the air and its electrical conditions; the degrees of temperature, dryness, and moisture of surrounding media; the nature and extent of our food and drink; the passions by which we are agitated, with all the other changes and chances of our social and individual position; these are the elements to which we must look not only for the causes of disorders, but for the causes of health itself.

Having alluded to the great error of the "anatomical," or, as it is sometimes called, the "pathological" school, we may now glance at the doctrines of another class of partialists, those who, with the quantity or quality of our food or airs, associate every disorder,—as if passions, burns, blows, wounds, &c., were mere words. The late Mr. Abernethy, to whom science, nevertheless, owes something, was an example of the first. To the stomach and bowels, he almost invariably pointed as the first cause of every disturbance. He forgot his own observation, that a passion, or blow, will alter the secretions of both. He ascribed the first link in the chain of causes to a feature, which could only be improved by an agent affecting the nervous or perceptive system, in which that and every other symptom could alone have their origin.

But what shall we say of those who, like M.Culloch and others, attribute every disorder in which remittency of symptom takes place to marsh-miasma or malaria,—to exhalations from the fens, marshes, &c.,—when, as we shall shortly show, every disease which has obtained a name, may not only admit of this phenomenon; but that none, by whatever caused or characterised, are in the first instance without their remissions or intermissions, all more or less periodic and perfect. Man is not an isolated being; without air or food he cannot exist; and a partial deprivation or depravity of either, will give rise to almost every affection to which he is liable; but his success in life, his reception from friend and foe, the state of family or finances, will equally excite, depress, and disorder his various organs and functions, as a deprivation or depravity of the food he eats, or the air he breathes. An unexpected reverse of fortune, good or bad, may lay the foundation of a thousand maladies; nay, examples are on record, where individuals have instantly expired from intensity of sudden joy. Of sudden grief many have been the victims.

"It has been too much the fashion in philosophy," says Sir Humphrey Davy, "to refer operations and effects to single agencies, but there are, in fact, in nature two grand species of relationship between phenomena; in one an infinite variety of effects is produced by a single cause, in the other, a great variety of causes is subservient to one effect." This observation applies with particular force to everything pertaining both to the causes of disease

and its cure. The single agency of thermal change, for example, has given rise to cough, catarrh, rheumatism, dropsy, and a host of other disorders in one class of individuals; while in another class, to call forth any one of such states, it would require the united influence of intemperance, domestic trouble, and deprivation of food, in addition to that thermal change, which of itself singly produced all these diseases in the former. Physicians are in the habit of dividing diseases into two classes, namely, constitutional and local, and they treat them as such accordingly; but, properly speaking, there never was a purely local disease. You will doubtless ask me if toothache, consumption, and ulcers, are not local diseases? So far from this, it is impossible for such states to take place, (unless where they happen to be produced by outward injury,) without the previous condition of entire constitutional disturbance, of which, instead of being causes, as many suppose and teach, they are only effects or features. Let the physician recur to nature, he will find that the subjects of all such diseases laboured under a general derangement of the whole habit, previously to the development of the local consequences from which these diseases take their designations. Now, some will call this disturbance by one name, and some by another; for myself, I am satisfied with the phrase, "loss of health," but as many of you, Gentlemen, may not be content without a medical term, I will call it, to please you, FEVER; and as remissions or periods of comparative ease are enjoyed by the subjects of all these diseases, I will go farther, and call it REMITTENT Fever. Yes, Gentlemen, all diseases have remissions, and "this," says John Hunter, "is an attribute belonging to life, and shows that life cannot go on the same continually, but must have its hours of rest and hours of action."

We have already analyzed the Life of Health ;-we have seen that it consists in a periodic alternation of harmonious movements, some long, some short, greater and lesser movements, otherwise fits; in Shakspeare's language, Life is a “fitful FEVER." If so, what can the morbid modifications of that Life be, but modifications of Fitful or Intermittent Fever?" All diseases," says Hippocrates, "resemble each other in their form, invasion, march, and decline." "The type of all diseases," he adds, "is one and the same. What, then, is that type? If we succeed in proving to you that toothache, asthma, epilepsy, gout, mania, and apoplexy, all come on in fits; that all have febrile chills or heats; that intermissions or periods of immunity from suffering, more or less complete, are common to each; and that every one of these supposed different diseases may, moreover, be cured by any one of the agents most generally successful in the treatment of Intermittent Fever, popularly termed AGUE; to what other conclusion can we possibly come, but that this same Ague is the type which pervades, and the bond which associates together every one of these variously named diseases? If, in the course of these Lectures, we further prove that what are called “inflammations” also come on in fits; that the subjects of them have equally their periods of immunity from pain, and that these forms of disorder yield with equal readiness to the same remedial means;-who can be so unreasonable as to doubt or dispute that Ague is the model or likeness-the TYPE of ALL DISEASE!

But here let me be clearly understood;—let me not be supposed to say that every disease is an ague and nothing more. A canoe is the model of all sea-vessels, the TYPE of every brig, barque, frigate, sloop, and so forth, nautically termed SHIP. But, a ship is a canoe, and something more-a canoe enlarged and variously modified. Here, then, you have UNITY of type with VARIETY of developement,--simplicity of principle with numerous modifications of form. This is what I wish to impress upon you in the case of Disease. Let that, then, be your motto and your mark, and do not forget it in the practical application. Remember the constantly changing phenomena of Health,-their FEVER-like fit-fulness,-the slow manner in one case, the rapid manner in another, in which these healthy fitful motions run into