the succession of petty joys and sorrows, hopes and fears, which make up the day-dream of life, has yet another revolution, the Catamenial; and Parturition, or the process by which she brings their mutual offspring into the world, is a series of periodic pains and remissions. Every atom of the material body is constantly undergoing a revolution or alternation;-liquid or aëriform one hour, it becomes solid the next-again to pass into the liquid or aëriform state; and ever and anon varying its properties, colours, and combinations, as, in brief, but regular PERIODIC succession it assumes the nature of every organ, tissue, and secretion, entering into, or proceeding from, the corporeal frame. "It is every thing by turns, and nothing long." The phenomena of the human body, like every other phenomenon in nature, have all a relation to MATTER, SPACE, and TIME ;--and there is another word-MOTION, which may be said to bring all three to a unity; for without matter and space, there can be no motion, and motion being either quick or slow, must also express time or PERIOD. Moreover, there can be no motion in matter without change of temperature, and no change of temperature without motion in matter. This is so indisputable an axiom in physics, that Bacon and others supposed motion and change of temperature to be one and the same. You cannot, for example, rotate a wheel for a few seconds, without heat being produced, and the iron that binds it becomes expanded; in other words, it exhibits a motion outwards: when the same wheel is allowed to stand still, the temperature falls, and the iron hoop decreases in size. There is in that case motion inwards. By the same law, if, even in the middle of winter, you run for any length of time, you will become heated and bloated; and you again shrink in size when you stand still to cool yourselves. To the mind's eye, extremis probatis media presumuntur. Having shown the truth in extremes, we presume the rest; for as there are motions both of quickness and slowness that elude the eye, so are there changes of temperature that the thermometer may not reach. Those, then, who ascribe the source of animal heat exclusively to the lungs, seem to have forgotten these facts; they have forgotten, that in the constant mutation of its atoms, every organ, nay, every atom of that organ being ever in motion, must equally contribute to this end; for to this common law of ALL matter, every change in the body is subjected. The powers by which the corporeal motions are influenced, are the same that influence the motions of every kind of matter, namely, the electric, mechanical, and chemical forces, and the force of gravitation. When rightly considered, the whole of these powers resolve themselves into ATTRACTION and REPULSION. It is by attraction that the fluid matter of the blood first assumes the solid consistence of an organ; again to pass by repulsion into the fluidity of secretion. From the earth and to the earth, the matter composing our bodies comes and goes many times even in the brief space of our mortal existence. In this, the human system resembles a great city, the inhabitants of which, in the course of years, are constantly changing, while the same city, like the body, betrays no other outward appearance of change than what naturally belongs to the PERIODS of its rise, progress, maturity, or tendency to decay. The last, and one of the most important of the revolutions of the healthy state, is 66 SLEEP. Philosophers of all ages have made this an object of their most anxious study, its relation to death perhaps being their chief inducement to do so. "Half our days," says Sir Thomas Browne, we pass in the shadow of the earth, and Sleep, the brother of Death, extracteth a third part of our lives." In the state of perfect sleep, the pupil of the eye will not contract on the approach of light-the skin has no feeling -the ear no sense of hearing-the taste and smell are not to be roused by any of the ordinary stimuli. What is this (figuratively speaking) but a periodic half-death--speaking truly, but a periodic palsy or cessation of internal motion of the nerves by which we maintain a consciousness of existence, and perceive our relationship to the world around us? Broken sleep consists either in brief remissions of the whole sleeping state, or in a wakefulness of one or more of the five senses. There are individuals, for example, who always sleep with || organs in the bat, dormouse, and snake, their eyes open, and who would see you, were you to enter their chamber with the most noiseless tread. These tell you they are always half awake. In the condition of body termed nightmare, there is a consciousness of existence with a wakefulness of the nerves of sight or feeling; but with a total inability to influence the voluntary muscles by any effort of the will. The subject of it can neither sleep nor turn himself. The dreamer, portions of whose brain think, and therefore act or move, is partially awake. The somnambulist and sleep-talker, are dreamers, who, having portions of the brain in a state of action, and others torpid, perform exploits of deed or word, that bring you a mind of the maniac and the drunkard, whose powers of judging are defective. A man may be entirely awake with the exception of a single member; and this we still refer to a torpid state of some portion of the brain. Such a man will tell you that his arm or leg is asleep or dead. But, as this is a soporific subject, and have a soporific influence on some of you, may as well wake you up with an anecdote a brother medical officer of the army once told me of himself:-While serving in the East Indies, Dr. C. one night awoke, or I should rather say half awoke suddenly, when his hand at the instant came in contact with a cold animal body. His fears magnifying this into a cobra capel, he called out most lustily, "A snake, a snake!" But before his drowsy domestics had time to appear, he found he had mistaken his own sleeping arm for this most unwelcome of oriental intruders! may I Gentlemen, the human body in health is never asleep throughout, for when volition is paralysed-when we are all but dead to everything that connects us with the external world, the heart still continues to beat, the lungs perform their office, and the other internal organs, over which volition has no control, keep on their usual harmony of motion-in other words, the digestion of the food, the circulation of the blood, and the other lesser motions of organic life, proceed as in the waking state. The more important motions of the heart and lungs could not cease for many minutes without endangering the entire life in the higher animals-though these appear to be inactive for months. Nevertheless, even in those animals, they are not entirely so-the wasted state of their bodies, when they wake, proving the movement that had been going on in all the atoms of their various organs during the period of hybernation. The state termed a fainting fit, it is true, comprehends, even in man, a temporary palsy or death of the whole body; but such state prolonged to a very brief period passes into death perpetual. Catalepsy, or trance, being a sleep of ALL the organs, internal as well as external, though not of their atoms, has so great a resemblance to death, as to have been frequently mistaken for it. The subject of this condition of body, by something like the same inexplicable power which enables the dormouse to hybernate, may remain apparently dead for days and yet recover. More inexplicable still, if what travellers tell us be true, is the recovery to life of fish, that have been completely frozen for months. We now pass to the consideration of those alterations of the temperature, and periodic movements of the body, termed DISEASE OR DISORDER. Till the hour of sickness comes, how few non-medical persons ever think of a subject which ought to be of interest to all! The same men who discuss with becoming gravity the artificial inflections of a Greek or Latin verb, neglect to inform themselves of the natural laws that govern the motions of their own bodies! No wonder that the world should be so long kept in darkness on medicine and its mode of action,-no wonder that even educated persons should still know so little of the proper study of mankind-MAN! In the throes of disease, the early priests, as I have already told you, imagined they detected the workings of demons. Medical theorists, on the contrary, attributed them to morbid ingredients in the blood or bowels. One age bowed the knee to an "acrimony" or "putridity;" another acknowledged no cause but a "crudity," an 'acidity," or a "humour." The moderns hold the notion that a mysterious process, which they term "inflammation," is the head and front of all offending. How absurd each and all of these doctrines will appear in the sequel! Disease, Gentlemen, is neither a devil to "cast out," an acrimony 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 dif ference 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 developements of constitutional change?-they are phenomena which may or may not arise out of general corporeal disturbance, according to particular habits and predispositions. 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 CAUSES OF DISEASE. What are the agencies that give rise to Of ghastly spasms, or racking tortures, qualms 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 | in acute diseases," he continues, "which kind 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, || authority goes, you have the opinions of two 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 accessory -and the Physicians of some countries, India 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 professors have 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 minutiae of the dead-and finding, in their 66 and China for example, practise their profes-search, some petty enlargement, some trifling sion 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 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 developement 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 cathedra, that anatomy is the foundation 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 ex- || pert 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 to their suffering fellow-creatures. "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 No 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 successfuly 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 stumblingblock 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 |