70 INFLUENZA. 



Kegarding the collection of plionomena we encounter in 

 this fever as indicative of what is understood as active in- 

 flammatory action, and having no regard to the specificity of 

 the conditions and the certainty of a particular blood-con- 

 tamination, the most potent of remedies in active inflamma- 

 tions, blood-letting, has been too often indiscriminately had 

 recourse to. 



We ought not to forget that even allowing that here the 

 blood is contaminated, that we cannot deal with it while in the 

 body, but as a whole ; and that supposing it should be estab- 

 lished that here or in any other form of inflammatory 

 action certain constituents of the blood are in excess, we have 

 not the power in depletion to remove these morbid con- 

 stituents, excluding the remaining parts upon which life 

 depends. 



The principle upon which so many have gone, and that 

 upon which many still continue to act in adopting the system 

 of blood-letting in every inflammatory disease, proceeds from 

 their belief in, or, in cases where no belief is expressed, the 

 adoption of that theory which makes inflammation to consist 

 merely in the excessive determination of blood to the affected 

 part, in which for the time being there is an actual increase of 

 nutrition. 



Were such really the case, the abstraction of blood would 

 be a rational method of cure. 



However, in the parts where this action is localized all 

 healthy nutrition is suspended; in fact, the perversion of 

 nutrition is the great feature, or one of the great features, of 

 inflammation. 



Now, although we do find cases of acute inflammation in 

 our patients of such organs as the meninges of the brain, the 

 pleura, the peritoneum, the fibrous textures of joints and of 

 the feet, which are cured or benefited by rapid and full deple- 

 tion, and which, as far as we can observe, do not terminate so 

 favourably when this is neglected, still there seems reason to 

 believe that many types of inflammatory action are only 

 rationally and successfully combated when not only blood- 

 letting is avoided, but when that which seems a diametrically 

 opposite course — stimulation — is pursued. 



Blood is a peculiar fluid, and its removal from the living 



