64 BOEDER LINES OF KNOWLEDGE 



the ways of old Dr. Samuel Danforth, who, as it is well 

 known, had strong objections to the use of the lancet. 

 By and by a new reputation will be made by some dis- 

 contented practitioner, who, tired of seeing patients die 

 with their skins full of whiskey and their brains muddy 

 with opium, returns to a bold antiphlogistic treatment, 

 and has the luck to see a few patients of note get well 

 under it. So of the remedies which have gone out of 

 fashion and been superseded by others. It can hardly 

 be doubted that they will come into vogue again, more 

 or less extensively, under the influence of that irre- 

 sistible demand for change just referred to. 



Then will come the usual talk about a change in 

 the character of disease, which has about as much 

 meaning as that concerning " old-fashioned snow- 

 storms." " Epidemic constitutions " of disease mean 

 something, no doubt ; a great deal as applied to mala- 

 rious affections ; but that the whole type of diseases 

 undergoes such changes that the practice must be 

 reversed from depleting to stimulating, and vice versa, 

 is much less hkely than that methods of treatment go 

 out of fashion and come in again. If there is any 

 disease which claims its percentage with reasonable 

 uniformity, it is phthisis. Yet I remember that the 

 reverend and venerable Dr. Prince, of Salem, told me 

 one Commencement day, as I was jogging along to- 

 wards Cambridge with him, that he recollected the 

 time when that disease was hardly known ; and in 

 confirmation of his statement mentioned a case in 



