Medicine. 261 



ing from such doctrines may be discovered from 

 what appears in their writings. If it be thought 

 proper to admit such a capricious government of 

 the animal economy as these wTiters in some in- 

 stances maintain, it will follow that a rejection 

 must take place of all the physical and mechanical 

 reasoning which is employed concerning the human 

 body. 



Nor are the consequences of such doctrines con- 

 fined to reasoning and speculation. It appears 

 that Stahl and his followers, in the whole of their 

 practice, whatever may have been asserted to the 

 contrary, wxre very much governed by their 

 general principles. Trusting to the wusdom and 

 constant attention of nature, they proposed the art 

 of curing diseases hij expectation. As practitioners, 

 therefore, they seem to have been cautious, inde- 

 cisive and timid in the extreme; they adopted, for 

 the most part, only very feeble, inert and frivolous 

 remedies; and they strenuously opposed the use 

 of some of those which are most efficacious and 

 the most deserving of confidence. 



It would be doing injustice, however, to the 

 Stahlian practitioners not to acknowledge that 

 they greatly enriched medical science, by their in-r 

 cessant and unwearied observation of the history 

 and phenomena of diseases, and were instrumental 

 in directing the attention of physicians to those 

 salutary efforts of nature, which cannot be too ac- 

 curately understood, nor too diligently pursued 

 in the treatment of diseases. 



Frederick Hoffman is the last of the three il- 

 lustrious systematists whose different theories of 

 medicine were disclosed to the w^orld in the be- 

 ginning of the eighteenth century. He was the 

 colleague and rival of Stahl in the University of 

 Haiie, and a most learned and voluminous v>Tltcr. 

 For more than fifty years he flourished as a prac- 



