238 Dr Fuster on the Diseases of France 



ocean, sucli as Tristan d'Acunha, Ascension, St Helena, &c., 

 because we are completely unacquainted with their entomo- 

 logy. Many of the above regions, particularly such of them 

 as are intertropical, ought hereafter to be subdivided, when 

 we become more intimately acquainted with the habitations of 

 insects. 



Of the Diseases of France in their relation to the Seasons, or 



Sketch of a Medical and Meteorological History of France, 



By Dr Fuster.* I 



It is a principle of medical philosophy long since established, 



that relations of causality and dependence exist between 



the physical characters of the seasons and the nature of the 



common maladies which correspond to them. 



Endowed with its proper nature, each season determines,[in 

 the animal economy, an order of particular movements ; it 

 leaves there, on passing, impressions so much the more marked 

 and more durable, as its action is exercised unmixed, more 

 strongly, and for a longer pei'iod. The season which succeeds 

 comes in its turn to impress on hving bodies a diiferent series 

 of new movements, and by the aid of these oscillations, ba- 

 lanced between the limits which are assigned to them to tra- 

 verse, there is what may be reasonably called a medical year. 

 This principle of the agreement of the seasons with what 

 are called the small epidemics, fertile in clinical applications, 

 so proper to guide the physician in the diagnosis of diseases, 

 so useful to direct him in the study of their causes, so power- 

 ful to elevate him to the knowledge of their true nature, and 

 to the determination of their better treatment ; this principle, 

 I say, had been already laid down by Hippocrates. It is al- 

 ways found holciing a high place in his admirable books of 

 Epidemics ; and in his Treatise of the Air, JFater, and Localities, 

 one is still more sm'prised to read the following passage : As- 

 tronomy contributes not little, but very much, to the medical 

 art ; since the stomach changes with the seasons of the year, 



* Tliis is a " Eeport of a manuscript work presented to the French 

 Academy of Sciences, and published in Ike Comptes Eendus des Seances 

 de r Academic des Sciences, ^Sd September 1839, pp. 393," &c. (Commis- 

 sioners MM- Aeaoo and Double, the Eeport being by the latter.) 



