128 MEMOIR OF DR WRIGHT. 



He prefaces his abridgment with an account of the practice, 

 so far as it has hitherto been adopted ; and of the motives for 

 adopting it universally. The abridgment has gone to a se- 

 cond edition. He speaks very fully of you, and in the pro- 

 per terms : 



" It is a miserable thing to think that, while all their esta- 

 blished and common modes of treatment have proved so mi- 

 serably inefficient, the physicians of America should have been 

 engaged in such fierce and stupid controversies, which have 

 diverted their attention from the awful lessons which experi- 

 ence was presenting to them, in the continued mortality of 

 the fever. Though I sent my book to the Editors of the 

 American Medical Museum, published at New York, they 

 never found time to review it, or even i to notice it, be- 

 ing entirely occupied with theoretical disquisitions in support 

 of Mitchell's gratuitous theory respecting the principle of 

 contagion being the gaseous oxide of azote! an f hypothesis 

 created by the imagination ; but made the foundation of a 

 system of practice, — consisting of the administration of alka- 

 lis and alkaline earths, to correct, forsooth, the prevailing aci- 

 dity." 



About this period, Dr Wright thus writes to Dr 

 Garthshore : 



" Mr friend, Dr Lind, desires me to make his acknow- 

 ledgments to you, for your great attention to him while in 

 London. I proposed him as a Member of our Royal Socie- 

 ty, and he has been unanimously elected. I do not know a 

 more enlightened man, or a more judicious physician, than 

 Dr Lind. And, as hg has preserved accurate and methodi- 

 cal records of his cases for many years, and reads all the 

 modern publications, he will certainly prove a useful and va- 

 luable correspondent to the Medical Society. 



" In the Philosophical Magazine. No. 7- I think, an Amc- 



