OCR Text |
Show 4 Doctrines concerning Fever. Doctrines concerning Fever whole, as far as our proficiency in morbid Meanwhile, to promote useful discussion, as anatomy will permit, with the successive con~ far as may be in the power ofa private indi~ vidual, I shall undertake some enquiry into the progress and foundation of tenets, that have hitherto lain in unmerited obscurity. Whether ditions of the diseased system. Nevertheless, in the multiplicity of medical records, there are actually to be traced vestiges, we mum ‘ 5 and more than vestiges, of a doctrine fOunded upon these considerations combined: partially, it appears in the writings of physicians of no very modern date. Nay, such a doctrine, both in particular and in general, has been laid out, with all its evidence, in form. Among our» or not I enter upon a task so arduous, hastily and unprepared, it is for the reader to judge selves, it has recently been advanced, as a great fire, or new fashion of life, rather than to new and fruitful conjunction of ideas; the author, by strong implication, laying claim to that distinction, so properly held out by the father of medicine, to the physician who shall produce something superior to his fellows on skill; that, in one of our own European (lepem from the following digest of facts. He may, and perhaps withjustice, censure my profusion of authorities. But if he only consider that we owe our exemption from pestilence, to some dencies, we have just had to lament as great a mortality from fever, as was usual in ages of the deepest ignorance, not without destructive visitations at home; that caprice, skill and cala- acute disorders,» as being those, which cut off mity together have proved insufficient to guard the majority of mankind. our colonists in America, against rendering their At length, there‘ fore, the doctrine may, as it deserves, receive a new cities, as much hot beds of the calenture, as full discussion; for although not quite unknown to the schools of physio, it never our old ones had been of the plague; and that, far and wide through the civilized world, the fatal Icaus‘os ofremote antiquity still carries on its exterminating warfare against thebuman species; seems to have found its way to any of the more celebrated; in which, the professor has the obvious advantage of being able to prepossess he must feel how very few of the difficulties, a multitude of pupils, in favor of any system, And what comes abroad, with this sort 0f authority, is sure, we know, to find opponents which perplexed the earliest observers can as eager as its advocates, and so, by degrees, must be justly appreciated. be yet removed; nor will he require a very laboured excuse for some anxiety, in anther" ticating a statement, tending ever so remotely to their removal. After Mean while, |