PAN. 625 



disease,) and gone by excesses in every shape of wasting or 

 effete outpouring; nervous system run down like a clock, 

 and tottering, rickety, on the verge of dissolution by exhaus- 

 tion of life in a medium whose atmosphere is fire and poison- 

 ous gases; or the sack of water* which floats the organs is 

 impure, filled with corrupt particles terrible crop of spe- 

 cific disease, sprinklings from different pools of the Stygian 

 River, involving, as they do, all possible injuries, as lesions 

 of circulation, lesions of nutrition, lesions of secretion, lesions 

 of blood, and lesions of innervation, and can only be relieved 

 through centrifugal forces by the removal of abnormal and 

 the substitution of normal elements. By what instrumentali- 

 ties does the medical philosopher propose to execute the 

 arrestation or the elimination of disease, the prevention of 

 destruction, or expulsion of morbific or dead molecules, and 

 the establishment of newly-vitalized or renovated atoms ? A 

 full catalogue of all his implements of cure or assistants of 

 nature would be an entire schedule, or resume of the prin- 

 ciples and resources of the science of medicine in. the treat- 

 ment of the whole world of acute and chronic diseases, re- 

 corded in the extensive and painfully elaborated literature of 

 that noble profession. 



The vicious states, conditions, and habitudes of organs and 

 tissues, called chronic diseases, being in existence, and the 

 powers of the healing art being called into requisition, the 

 pathologist has still only the tragical play of ponderable and 

 imponderable, the aBther imparting the substance, the heat the 

 form, the light the life, modified by time. All interference 

 of art in these conditions is often vain, in a certain medium 

 or habitat, from the despotism of local causes. In an ex- 

 tensive range of diseased conditions in particular locali- 

 ties, it seems indispensable, to secure a sanitary change, 

 that all the relations, as far as possible, of ponderable and 

 imponderable, be modified, and that a new heat, light, and 

 galvanism, also new moral and aesthetic surroundings, must 



* "Life and organization -without water are inconceivable." 



SCHLEIDEN. 



53 



