EXTRACT XXII. 



ON INFLAMMATION. 



THE subject of inflammation has held the premier position 

 in interest and in the everyday practical experience of the 

 professors of the healing art since the days of Hippocrates. 

 We, therefore, approach its discussion with mixed feelings, 

 with one of great respect for those who have laid the 

 scientific foundation for truly apprehending its character 

 and nature, and another of strong desire to penetrate still 

 farther into the secrets which lie at its foundation, and to 

 place it, if possible, in a still more favourable position for 

 being completely apprehended, and its clinical importance 

 fully appreciated. 



Its symptomatology, as given by Celsus, has not yet 

 been materially departed from, being only supplemented 

 by a few additions, as the progress of knowledge dictated. 

 Its pathology, however, although of recent growth, has 

 made great and notable progress, until now we can appre- 

 hend much of the true meaning and significance of the 

 manifold processes involved in its initiation, progress and 

 subsidence. Fortunately for us, we have been able to 

 view by the aid of the microscope typical examples of it, 

 and to study them in detail, in their elementary manner of 

 evolution and involution, and have thereby become 

 familiarised, as we have with few pathological problems 

 or entities, with some of nature's ways of maiming and 

 mending, of making ill and making well, and of working 

 out the intimately related and continuous physiological and 

 pathological processes constituting disease, which are so 



