many of a similar kind are brought into one view, the conclusions from them, by induction, afford a high degree of certainty *.”
In the detail of cases, the greatest attention will be paid to present the reports as taken at the bedside of the patient. The reports of the cases in the house are taken daily in acute, and three times a-week in chronic diseases, but, wishing to avoid any unnecessary detail, those only are presented where some change of symptoms rendered it necessary to vary the plan of treatment. To detail cases that, in their termination, proved unfavourable, must be always unpleasant to the practitioner; but, relying on that candour and liberality, which, doubtless, characterises the medical profession, they are here the more willingly offered to the public, as the dissections may suggest to others a treatment that may be followed by a more favourable termination. With this agreeable impression, I shall proceed to an examination of the diseases contained in the table.
The three intermittents, noticed in the report, were brought from Lincolnshire, and cured by the cinchona; patients of this disease, received into our hospital of late years, require very little medicine, the fever, gradually decreasing, soon retires altogether.
Under typhus and asthenia are placed some few cases which bear a greater resemblance to the slow nervous fever of Huxham †, and might, with more propriety, be admitted under that
The febricula includes all cases of slight fever that cannot be admitted in the other genera; not strictly ephemera, but probably oftentimes symptomatic of some latent disease.
Among the ophthalmia are some cases of the more acute disease, answering to the description of that which afflicted our troops in Egypt, which, if not speedily arrested in its course, terminates in a total destruction of vision in the organ affected. It is not considered any farther contagious than by the application of the purulent discharge attending the disease to a sound eye; this was particularly marked in a family where the father was first affected, and the disease was communicated to the daughter by using the same towel. The plan usually pursued to arrest the disease, has been copious general bleeding; leeches to the temples, followed by blisters; scarifications; and topical appli
In the treatment of rheumatism, the cinchona bark, as recommended
**Haygarth's Clinical Diseases, Part I. p. 3. + Huxham on Fever, sd edit. p. 74.