Dr. Hall's could be anything beyond taking an effect for a cause; for granted that the blood was suddenly abstracted from the brain, it could only have been done by driving it out, for which there is no mechanism, or attracting it away, in which case the phenomena are not dependent upon the abstraction, and the abstraction and other phenomena are dependent upon an impression. Besides persons in a weak stato of health can get very well through a deal of mental work with as little blood in their brains as some of these people could have had when they fainted.

Again compression of the upper part of the spinal marrow is as certainly and often as suddenly fatal as any interference with the lungs or heart, or with the formation of bile in the liver or carbonic acid in the lungs. This has repeatedly happened from accident, as from a man being thrown from a cart or falling from a house roof or from striking the head suddenly against an archway when riding. Still more to the purpose it has happened from disease and yet from first to last the patient has never had any symptoms of the affection. Sir Charles Bell speaks of a patient who died in this way; the man's sister said he used to complain of pain in his back after taking long walks and that "all the complaint which he had was this pain in his back."

As disease is but disorder with the addition of some change of tissue, an element more of growth or destruction, it is not necessary to dilate upon it to any great extent, for in respect to the laws which regulate them, what holds good of the one must of the other. It will I trust suffice to point out

one or two instances showing how purely vital this action is, how little it supports the chemical and mechanical doctrines now so prevalent, and what a striking disparity there is in many cases between the amount of mechanical disturbance and the disorder set up in the system.

Thus it has repeatedly happened that a man has been bled to the extent of a hundred or a hundred and fifty ounces in a few days, while the loss of a very small quantity of blood in a person labouring under malignant disease has destroyed life. On one occasion a surgeon opened a small abscess near a fungous growth on a girl's leg; the contents were chiefly blood, and before two ounces were taken away the girl sank and died. The removal of a nævus or mother's mark has caused the death of a patient when very little blood has been lost, and death has followed. a gush of blood from a very small artery giving way. Mechanical physiologists want us to believe that this all comes from the blood being suddenly withdrawn from the heart, forgetting to tell us why the heart does not collapse in so many cases of violent and sudden bleeding from wounds; why the action of the heart can be arrested for so many minutes or hours without any collapse and whether they have ever assured themselves that the heart did collapse.

The loss of a large quantity of serum, the formation of which requires but a low degree of action and a great quantity of blood, may be borne without materially injuring health or comfort, and yet in this very person and at this very part the forming of a small quantity of pus, requiring a higher degree of action but less blood, may produce the most serious results. Thus in

the Medico-Chirurgical Society's Transactions* there is recorded a case of ovarian dropsy where the health remained unaffected while the cyst only secreted the usual fluid, but where death at once ensued when pus was formed in another cyst.

Some years ago I published the history of a case of death from cold applied to an enlarged breast. While the breast was growing the patient suffered no material inconvenience, but the breast having been frozen to check the growth, acute inflammation set in and the patient, a fine healthy woman, suddenly sank and died. Now I am certain that there was not more blood abstracted from the system here than I have often seen in a wound in some drunken brawl. As to poisoning of the blood there could be nothing of the kind. The breast was like a lump of cartilage.

In disease the same law prevails as in disorder from stimulants and shock, namely that a small amount of very sudden disturbance is much worse borne than a large amount spread over a long time, just indeed as we might expect; e. g. a large chronic abscess has grown as it were in parts where a small abscess suddenly formed would prove fatal.

Diseases and the destruction of tissue they produce are cured and their doings repaired in proportion to the simplicity of the structures they invade. Fat, cellular tissue, blood being quickly formed are soon lost and soon regained; skin gland, nerve and organs once destroyed are never repaired; there is no second pushing out of the vital power as during the first months of growth.

Vol. iii. p. 40.

Certainly in some diseases most confidently set down to blood poisons, while most violent and lasting changes are impressed upon the actions of the frame, the amount of lasting influence exerted on the blood is imperceptible, if indeed any take place at all. Thus small-pox and cow-pox, while they bring on so far as I have been able to learn no enduring change in the blood, effect such a wonderful revolution in the susceptibility of the body that it now remains unaffected by a contagion which formerly threatened life itself. In hydrophobia as has been said there is just as little evidence of any change.

So far then as I can see into the matter, and I profess to go no further than any person can by simply divesting his mind of theories and observing for himself, all that the phenomena of life, growth and decay, of health and sickness really teach us is that there is but one power in the frame, the vital power; a fixed, imponderable, invisible quality impressed upon the clay of which we are made in order that certain functions may be performed; that growth, formation and disease are varieties of the same action; that any change we see in their products is not a new element, but only the result of the preponderance of some natural ingredient; and that there is no necessity for such an intangible phantasy as a blood-poison to explain what we know of nature's wondrous and beautiful works in the great archetype, man,

Every abnormal action is marked by a failure of vital power at one or more parts of the frame, and an accumulation of it in the suffering organs; the varieties of disease must depend on the constitution of the part assailed, and the object of the physician must be

to attract it back to those parts where its presence is required, and as all the functions demand the presence of a certain amount of vital power for their due performance, there is a constant tendency to restore the balance deranged by disease. In chronic disorder the strain on the economy seems too slight to rouse up any violent action in the other parts, and we can only effect a cure by irritants, which carry the vital action. so high that when the rebound takes place it reverts to the normal state; like a bent spring which when bent still further straightens itself by the recoil. This fact, so constantly ignored, appears to me the basis on which physiology must rest. Considered in its most comprehensive sense, excessive local action embraces every variety of disease. How, let me ask, are we to reconcile the fact that a disease, erysipelas for example, is treated with equal success by one surgeon with purgatives, by another with incisions, by a third with powerful stimulants, unless we admit that disease is ever an excessive local action, admitting of cure by any means capable of directing anew the vital force into its normal channels.

Hunter

By observing closely we may see the working of a law which though its agency is visible enough, proves very difficult to define. described some of its results as the law of remote sympathy, but it appears to me to have a far wider range than he gave it, and to embrace not only disease but the reasons why some medicines fail and others succeed in certain complaints. This law really is that if a cause of disorder be applied to a certain part, the vital power will not only flow to that part but to another and distant part also. Again in certain