PREFACE. Vll 



respect to their immediate cause, or to their immediate 

 effect 



The uses of the method here offered to the public, 

 of classing diseases according to their proximate causes 

 are, first, more distinctly to understand their nature by 

 comparing their essential properties. Secondly, to fa- 

 cilitate the knowledge of the methods of cure; since in 

 natural classification of diseases the species of each 

 genus, and indeed the genera of each order, a few 

 perhaps excepted, require the same general medical 

 treatment. And lastly, to discover the nature and the 

 name of any disease previously unknown to the physi- 

 cian; which I am persuaded will be more readily and 

 more certainly done by this natural system, than by the 

 artificial classifications already published. 



The common names of diseases are not well adapt- 

 ed to any kind of classification, and least of all to this, 

 from their proximate causes. Some of their names 

 in common language are taken from the remote cause, 

 as worms, stone of the bladder; others from the remote 

 effect, as diarrhoea, salivation, hydrocephalus; others 

 from some accidental symptom of the disease, as tooth- 

 ach, head-ach, heart-burn; in which the pain is only a 

 concomitant circumstance of the excess or deficiency 

 of fibrous actions, and not the cause of them. Others 

 again are taken from the deformity occasioned in con- 

 sequence of the unnatural fibrous motions, which con- 

 stitute diseases, as tumours, eruptions, extenuations; all 

 these therefore improperly give names to diseases; and 

 some difficulty is thus occasioned to- the reader in en- 

 deavouring to discover to what class such disorders be- 

 long. 



Another difficulty attending the names of diseases is. 

 that one name frequently includes more than one dis- 

 ease, either existing at the same time or in succession. 



