38 Dr. Mac CuUoch on Fevers. 



on Malaria, we doubted that he could make good his general 

 assertion of the community of causes and nature, in this long 

 list of diseases, formerly judged of so very differently : while 

 we much suspect that our doubts were shared by the whole 

 of his profession. All that we can do now is to express our 

 own conviction, while we take no shame to ourselves for not 

 having believed before evidence : what may be the decision 

 of the rest of his fraternity, we have no means of knowing ; 

 but if he expresses his total want of hope as to the producing 

 of conviction, we really know not how to contradict him — as 

 our own experience in the other sciences has taught us that a 

 teacher and a reformer is always looked on with an evil eye. 

 But he must console himself under the thunders that are 

 accumulating over his head, as well as he can: while, that 

 he will do so is probable, since he seems amply prepared, and 

 therefore little likely to suffer his peace to be disturbed by 

 that abuse under which he seems to have been tolerably well 

 trained. — To proceed to the book itself. 



In the work on Malaria, and in the Essay on Fevers, with 

 which he has favoured our Journal, this author attempts 

 to show that no other causes of proper simple fever have 

 been proved, than contagion and malaria ; the first gener- 

 ating proper Typhus, and the other all the fevers of what- 

 ever character that are not contagious : though he makes a 

 reservation respecting what is called Inflammatory fever 

 when it is of very short duration. Hence, in the first volume, 

 he has described all the continuous or remitting fevers which 

 are non-contagious, as varieties of Remittent or Marsh 

 fever ; and these form one division in this volume ; the In- 

 termittent ones forming the other. Yet he objects to the 

 separation ; since these two kinds perpetually pass into each 

 other, as they arise from a common cause ; adopting it 

 nevertheless in conformity to popular usage, and thus sub- 

 mitting to some disarrangement and repetition, for which he 

 apologizes on this ground. Under each of these, also, he has 

 arranged certain varieties and variations which he has termed 

 obscure, anomalous, and simulating ; and here it is that the 

 chief value of these new investigations lies, since it is from 

 confounding these disorders with others of a very different, 

 and often of a diametrically opposite nature, that have arisen 

 those destructive errors in practice which he has so distinctly 

 pointed out. It being also the professed object of his work 

 to clear up obscurities, to describe what had been neglected, 

 to explain and rectify what had been misapprehended, and 

 above all, to refer to marsh fever under those variations, 



