TREATMENT OF INFLAMMATION. 145 



vessels of an inflamed part, I was led to imagine that, 

 by preventing the return of blood from the kidney in 

 one of the lower animals, and taking care not to 

 injure the artery in the experiment, a condition of 

 the organ similar to that present in acute nephritis 

 would be produced."* The result of one or two 

 trials proved this expectation to have been well 

 founded ; and, thus encouraged, I proceeded, in the 

 course of the following summer, to extend my obser- 

 vations, and to vary the conditions of the experiment. 

 The .facts thus obtained, appearing sufficiently 

 numerous and decisive to justify me in attempting 

 to discard the generally received opinions on the 

 subject, were embodied in a paper on the nature of 

 inflammation ; but the publication of these views 

 has, from a variety of causes, been delayed till the 

 present moment. The experiments themselves, and 

 the conclusions to which they directly led, were, 

 however, through the kindness of Dr. Marshall Hall, 

 presented to the Royal Medical and Chirurgical 

 Society, in February 1843, and published in the 

 next volume of that Society's Transactions. And, 

 on the whole, this delay has not been without some 

 advantage. For the intervening period has not only 



* An Inquiry into the Nature of Granular Disease of the Kidney, 

 p. 30, 1842. This little brochure will be found to contain, in a 

 conjectural form, most of the physiological and pathological prin- 

 ciples embodied in this communication. There is, however, an 

 important error in it which I am anxious to correct. It arose from 

 my confusion of the lobules visible on the surface of the kidney with 

 the proper Malpighian bodies, since described by Mr. Bowman. 

 Bnt, as my reasoning was evidently intended to apply to the former, 

 it becomes rather a verbal error than one of fact. 



