CONSERVATIVE DESIGN OF ORGANIC DISEASE. 161 



assisted, and not interrupted, by the interference of art ; it was, how- 

 ever, admitted that the " rational soul," owing to surprise, fear, or 

 despair, occasioned by too sudden or vehement impressions made 

 upon it, would sometimes excite adverse motions which it was right 

 to moderate. 



Prevailing only for a season, the system of Stahl was finally aban- 

 doned as a visionary hypothesis ; it was deprecated, as leading physi- 

 cians to neglect the use of remedies ; for its followers, trusting chiefly 

 to the attention and wisdom of Nature, adopted the inactive mode of 

 curing by expectation la medecine expectmite, as the French term it. 

 The use of opium, cinchona, mercury, and other potent medicines, was 

 zealously opposed by the Stahlian physicians, and they Avere extreme- 

 ly reserved also in the use of bleeding, emetics, and other evacuant 

 remedies.' 



Before we dismiss this part of the subject, it may be worth while 

 to note, as illustrating tlie not uncommon cyclical revolution of opin- 

 ion on scientific questions that are yet unsettled, that the medical 

 practitioners of to-day at least the best or most successful of them 

 have adopted the identical mode of practice for promoting which the 

 doctrine of Stahl was allowed to fall into disrepute. Nowadays, like 

 the Stalilians of old, we have laid aside bleeding and emetics, mercury 

 and evacuants, and, content with feeding the patient and contributing 

 to his comfort, we leave the disease to take care of itself we tinist 

 again to the vis mecUcatrix natiirce. The physician of to-day who 

 should boast of curing a disease (unless, indeed, it were an ague, with 

 quinine), would be considered, by his more highly-informed fellow- 

 practitioners, as profoundly ignorant of the recent advances made in 

 the science of pathology. 



Another erroneous hypothesis, not differing very widely fi-om the 

 idea of Stahl, and which may be named and dismissed before we pro- 

 ceed, is that which supposes the existence, in the nervous system, of 

 some tangible, central point of nerve-matter, from which, as from a 

 seat of government, mandates are issued to control the motions and 

 changes that take place in every quarter of the organism ; and which 

 leads us to infer that processes of disease, since, as it would seem, they 

 are allowed to take place by this governing " central point," would be 

 rather protective than- suicidal to the individual. This view never 

 very widely acknowledged received its final death-blow by the pub- 

 lication of Virchow's " Cellular Pathology," in which it was shown 

 that the entire organism, in all its parts, is really composed of an in- 

 definite number of individual centres, in fact cells, each of which has 

 a life of its own, performs its own functions, and dies its own death : 

 it is the invisible motions of these millions of microscopic entities^ 



' Stahl's principal work, in which his system was displayed in its most matured form, 

 was entitled " Theoria Medica vera, Physiologiam et Pathologiam sistens." Printed at 

 Halle, in I'ZOS. 



TOL. VII. 11 



