524 MEALS MEDICINAL. 
1?? 
you have here “Yes,” said the guide, in a dry, matter- 
oi-fact way, “in America we generally put our men of note 
in oil,” speaking just as if they were tinned Sardines. 
By the first London Pharmacope@ia, 1618, an Oil of St. John’s 
Wort (Hypericum perjoratum), was ordered to be made. It 
possesses .a specially beautiful red colour. This oil prepared 
from the plant-tops is highly useful for healing bed sores and 
ulcers. It has a particular virtue for allaying spinal irritability if 
rubbed into the back bone. The flowers when bruised between 
the fingers yield a bright red juice, so that the herb has obtained 
the title of (Sanguis hominis,) human blood. Furthermore, it is 
“* Medicamentum in mansé intus sumendum” to be chewed for 
its curative effects. : 
As supplementary to the commendation of Cod-liver Oil 
specifically for consumptive patients, some facts respecting the 
open-air treatment recently brought by physicians into universal 
vogue (as promising to altogether eradicate this dire and 
destructive disease, especially from among young persons 
having proclivities thereto), may be usefully brought under notice. 
The main ratio medendi of open-air treatment for consumptives 
depends on our present positive acquaintance with the bacillus 
which denotes tubercular consumption, and reveals itself in the 
sputa (phlegm, and spittle) of the infected patient; together 
with proofs incontestable that abundance of fresh, open, cold, 
dry air, by day, and by night, with plentiful sunshine, and 
generous food, even’ almost to excess, serve to exterminate this 
tuberculous bacillus. Nevertheless, so happy an issue during 
the individual lifetime, or experience of one generation, 18 
only to be made sure of in cases of acquired consumption, 
without a deep-rooted, inherited tuberculous bias of longer 
inheritance, which is defiant of sanative expulsion by any such 
speedy, and plausible means. ‘‘ The medical mind,” as Dr. 
Pearse, of Plymouth, sagaciously admonishes, “is too much 
exercised about a bacillus as the cause of consumption, over 
looking the great biological, orderly, wide, and profound 
correlations of this disease,—correlations which extend back 
often to many generations, whilst involving structure, and 
function.” Bitter must as yet be the disappointments of many 
too hopeful victims, and of their over-sanguine friends, because 
of ingrained tubercular seeds, virulent enough to withstand 8 
series of lives, before being totally vanquished by science and 
