308

WHAT CAUTION NECESSARY.

necessary, becomes either objectionable or requiring the utmost caution. For although an organ diseased in structure will, under some circumstances, yield its characteristic secretion, yet unless we know the extent of the disease, which is just the thing we can almost never be certain about, excitement of it is never without danger. We should therefore excite the primary organ with more or less energy, with more or less caution, or not at all, according to circumstances. If we determine on not exciting it, we should then act on organs with which it has ordinarily closest community of function, or on whose integrity we can most depend; for, choice, we prefer organs which, in a natural state, have nearest identity of function, as having the readiest sympathy, it may be, with each other. Yet so universal is the sympathy between all the organs, that there is no one, that will not, under certain circumstances, or which may not be induced perhaps by judicious management, to take on compensating actions.

We must not here pursue this subject further.

AUTHOR'S OBLIGATIONS TO ABERNETHY. 309

We have endeavoured to sketch certain extensions of the views of Mr. Abernethy, and can only refer the profession and the public, for the facts and arguments which demonstrate and illustrate them, to those works in which they have been* enunciated. They have now been subjected to severer trials, and abundant criticisms; so far as we know they have not been shaken, but if there be any merit in them, if they shall have made any nearer approach to a definite science, or sketched the proofs that Induction alone can place us in a position to talk of science at all; they are still sequences easily arrived at by a steady analysis of Abernethy's views. It was he who taught us, in our pupil days, first to think on such subjects; to him we owe the first glimpse we ever had of the imperfect state of medical and surgical science; and if we do not wholly owe to him the means by which we conceive it can alone be rendered more perfect and satisfactory, he has at least in part exemplified the application of

*Medicine and Surgery, one Inductive Science, and on Tumours."-Art. Treatment of Organs.

310 IMPRESSIONS PRODUCED BY "MY BOOK."

them. If we have made some advances on what he left us, and added to his beautiful and simple general views, something more definite on some points, something more analytical on others; still, inasmuch as they are clear deductions from the views he has left us, and from such views alone; such advances remind us that the study of his principles serves but to demonstrate their increasing usefulness, and to augment the sum of our obligations.

SECTION.

Mr. Abernethy's book "On the Constitutional Origin of Local Diseases," had an extensive circulation, and excited a great deal of attention from the public as well as the profession.

As a work, which may be read, as it were, in two ways, so as a person read it, with one or other object, it produced a great variety of impressions. It may be read simply as a narrative of a number of facts, with the inferences immediately deducible from them.

All this is plain and intelligible at once to anybody, and of great practical value; but the work contains numerous observations of a suggestive kind, that require careful thought, and some previous knowledge, to enable a person to estimate their value, or to trace their onward relations. The impression made by the work on different minds varied, of course, with the reader, his information, and, in some sort, with the spirit in which it was studied; some who had, in their solitary rides, and in the equally solitary responsibilities of country practice, been obliged to think for themselves, recognised in the orderly statement of clearly enunciated views, facts and principles which they had already seen exemplified in their own experience, and hailed with admiration and pleasure, a book which realized their own ideas, and supplied a rational explanation of their truth and value.

Some, who had never thought much on the subject, and were very ill-disposed to begin, regarded his ideas as exaggerated; and hastily dismissed the subject, with the conclusion

Still,

that he was a clever man, but too full of theory, too much disposed to look to the stomach or the digestive organs. Others, making very little distinction between what they heard of the man, the book, or his practice; and probably not having seen either, but deriving only a kind of dreamy notion of a clever man, with many peculiarities, would say that he was mad or an enthusiast. a great many of the thinking portion of the Public and the profession, held a different tone. The book was recognized as an intelligible enunciation of definite views; rather a new thing in medical science. The application of them became more and more general, his pupils were everywhere disseminating them more or less in the navy, in the army, in the provinces, and in America.

Still, it must not be imagined that his principles were disseminated with that rapidity, which might have been inferred from his numerous and attentive class. Constituted as medical education is-but more especially as it was at that time, for it is slowly im