Dr. Mac CuUoch on Fevers, 61 



pared in importance with those which will follow from the 

 diminution of the heaviest calamity that can afflict human 

 nature. 



Thus we must bring to an end all that we can possibly 

 venture to take room for ; while also apologizing for the 

 lengtli to which our analysis has extended, but which we 

 could not well have curtailed without rendering it useless. 

 We did promise to have extracted some of the author's general 

 remarks on the evacuant practice in its various misapplica- 

 tions ; but our limits forbid us to do all that we had intended 

 But as we cannot absolutely omit it all, we must trust to our 

 reader's pardon for the brevity and imperfection of what we 

 can alone undertake to state on this subject. 



These relate to that practice, recently become a fashion, 

 as he truly calls it, which consists in bloodletting, cupping, 

 and the use of purgatives, comprising chiefly calomel and 

 salts ; and the application, or rather misapplication of these 

 remedies, which he censures, being almost as often the work 

 of patients themselves as of their physicians, is chiefly to the 

 following diseases : to palsies generally, and more particularly 

 to those affections as aependent on marsh fever or its causes, 

 and to apoplexy from the same cause, consequently, and for 

 the same reasons ; to an imaginary disease, fashionably, and 

 recently introduced under the term *'flow of blood to the 

 head," and very generally to a wide class of nervous affections 

 similarly mistaken for plethora and inflammation, whether 

 arising from chronic marsh fever or from any other causes ; 

 lastly, to specific disorders depending on neuralgia and marsh 

 fever, on which we cannot and need not be more particular, 

 after what we have said in the preceding analysis. And we 

 ought to remark that he includes the modern and fashionable 

 recommendation of low diet or abstinence in the same general 

 charge. 



He shows, that be the causes what they may, palsies are 

 thus aggravated, or rendered incurable, or even mortal ; 

 and that fatuity, and even mania, are thus produced, as is 

 also epilepsy ; while in cases of a less aggravated nature, 

 numerous nervous affections of less severity are brought on, 

 and the health of the patient ruined for life. On the imaginary 

 flow of blood to the head, he shows that this is a temporary 

 action of the carotid or other arteries of this part, analogous to 

 that general action of the whole arterial system which occurs 

 in the hot fit of intermittent, and often arising from that 

 disorder in its chronic form, but unsuspected. And he shows 

 that the practice of cupping, and even of purging, or of low 



