XI INSTRUCTION IN PHYSIOLOGY 205 



Listening: to ordinary talk about health, clis- 

 ease, and death, one is often led to entertain a 

 doubt whether the speakers believe that the course 

 of natural causation runs as smoothly in the hu- 

 man bod}^ as elsewhere. Indications are too often 

 obvious of a strong, though perhaps an unavowed 

 and half unconscious, under-current of opinion 

 that the phenomena of life are not only widely 

 different, in their superficial characters and in 

 their practical importance, from other natural 

 events, but that they do not follow in that definite 

 order which characterises the succession of all 

 other occurrences, and the statement of which we 

 call a law of nature. 



Hence, I think, arises the want of heartiness of 

 belief in the value of knowledge respecting the 

 laws of health and disease, and of the foresight 

 and care to which knowledge is the essential pre- 

 liminarv, which is so often noticeable; and a cor- 

 responding laxity and carelessness in practice, the 

 results of which are too frequently lamentable. 



It is said that among the many religious sects 

 of Russia, there is one which holds that all disease 

 is brought alwut by the direct and special inter- 

 ference of the Deity, and which, therefore, looks 

 with repugnance upon both preventive and cura- 

 tive measures as alike blasphemous interferences 

 with the wdll of God. x\mong ourselves, the 

 " Peculiar People " are, I believe, the only persons 

 who hnld the like doctrine in its integrity, and 



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