to Vacca Berlinghieri, Professor at Pisa, we ought no longer to talk about humors. It was necessary to study the solids and the forces that animate them. No more of putrefaction in the circulating fluids; this takes place not within but out of the vessels. The constitution of the atmosphere alters the humors only by acting on the solids. He admits a principle of reaction which is the cause of salutary and morbid changes, and is in fact vital energy; and medicine acts by means of the substances prescribed, on this vital energy. The base of this theory is good; not so its application. Physicians dwelt as yet among important generalities. In spite of themselves they were drawn on to consider the vital principle as some separate abstract being: irritation was not studied in its actual effects on each organ, nor was the connection traced between the irritability of each tissue and the irritants actually employed.

Grimaud, Professor at the school at Montpelier, was among the vitalists, but in a peculiar way. He discovered a great affinity between nervous diseases and fevers. He observed among the phenomena the principle of reaction. The heat and cold of fever are equally affections of the nerves. But the faults of the humors, (the fluids) are not the result of those of the solids, for the vital principle acts equally on the fluids. These fluids then have their appropriate diseases independent of the solids. This modification of the humoral pathology, adopted also by Bordeu, has always had its partizans. But to adopt a vital principle which sometimes hovers over the solids, and sometimes over the fluids, separated from both, is Ontology. (It is Prosopopeia.-Trans.) To see morbid entities all ready formed in the fluids, before the solids are affected by them, is illusion and chimera. The fluids, as we shall see by and by, may contain a cause of disease resident for sometime within themselves, but the disease itself does not reside there. To make the curative modifiers act upon the fluids instead of the solids, is another illusion supported by no fact. Whatever part we choose to assign to the living solid in that theory, we can see nothing that induces us to confound it with the doctrine of Irritation.

Notwithstanding all the labors of the solidists, they had not yet extended unity to the different phenomena of the animal body. Most of the physicians were inclined to separate as Haller did, nervous energy from muscular irritabili

must study cach part of the body in its relation to the external agents of excitation, and ascertain how the respective organs mutually excite each other; and we must attentively study the effects of internal and external excitants, on each of the tissues of which the bodily organs are composed. Brown neglected this: for this manner of studying excitation, is no other than the modern physiological method of the French school. Let us see then what Brown did, and what was the cause of his mistakes.

He considered excitation abstractedly; separately from the excited organs, and he threw himself by his very first step among the Ontologists. Then he applied to the organs his reveries on excitability. He held that excitability, in a general view of it as a modification of life, is consumed and worn out by excitement and the action of excitants; it is then accumulated by rest, or the absence of excitement. From this view he deduced many consequences by no means just. Hence with him, a moderate excitement sustains the equilibrium of the vital forces, as no person will contest: a greater degree of excitement produces an increase of strength, and becomes a source of sthenic disease or disease from excess of force. A still stronger excitement exhausts excitability and produces debility or indirect asthenia. Direct asthenia, is the consequence of defect of excitement. The more this defect is increased, the greater is the quantity of excitability accumulated, till it becomes excessive. Brown formed a regular double scale, representing on one side, all the degrees of augmertation and excitement by the action of stimulants to the highest degree, which then became converted into indirect debility or asthenia; and on the other side, all the degrees of augmented excitability by reason of want of stimulus, till direct debility or asthenia was induced, as far as extreme weakness, terminating in death.

It cannot but be felt how absurd is a theory which places. the highest degree of excitability at that moment when excitability itself is about to be extinguished by death. But this is not the least fault: the great objection is, that it led the Brunonians on to a most fatal practice. The false position that the vital force constantly diminishes by a high degree of excitement, introduced to make room for indirect debility, led Brown to treat by excitants all those inflammatory affections, which overwhelmed and oppressed muscular

excited were cured by excitants; but this is to be ascribed to revulsion; that is, where there is a change of the locality of excitation, transferred from organs of the first necessity to life, to another set of organs or to tissues of secondary importance, which are often sacrificed to preserve the more essential ones primarily affected. Brown did not perceive that these fortunate crises were so uncommon, that in a great majority of cases the exciting treatment destroys the principal organs, or produces diseases of debility almost always incurable.

But Brown was neither a practitioner or an anatomist, nor in his day was the degree of vitality of the several tissues sufficiently known, to render it possible to observe accurately their excitability, or to obtain a just idea how excitation was transmitted from one to another; a system of analytic anatomy was wanting; and a nation was wanting which possessed a Chaussier and a Bichet.

Such is the substance of the famous Brunonian system. It was not rigorously adopted in the schools of medicine. Some modified it without changing its basis; in others it was made to amalgamate with the humoral theories; that is, the treatment was sometimes applied to peccant humors, and sometimes to excess or defect of vital force. Others adopted a kind of empiricism, wherein Brown's theory indicated the curative treatment. Each disease was regarded, not as an affection of this or that organ, but as a group of symp→→ toms bearing a certain name, and requiring as a matter of course, debilitants or tonics. When the patient was visited, the symptoms were counted and noted, without noting what organ was affected, and furnished them. To this collection. of symptoms, a name of that disease was given, to which they seemed to have most relation. The name was drawn from ancient authors; but as to the treatment, that was drawn from the Scotch practice. If the disease was of a sthenic character, according to Brown, debilitants were exhibited if it appeared to be asthenic, stimulants were preferred; and this was most frequently the case.

This method was not always strictly pursued, for none of these systems had any regular foundation. For instance, among febrile diseases, somewhere called after the part affected pneumonies, peritonitis, hepatitis; others after the state of the patients strength, as adynamic (or typhoid) fevers, sthenics or asthenics : some were denominated from the