3^6 Medicine. [Chap, IV, 



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 writers in some in^ 

 stances maintain, it will follow that a rejection 

 of all the physical and mechanical reasoning which 

 is employed concerning the human body must 

 fake place. 



Nor are the consequences of such doctrines coh- 

 fmed to reasoning and speculation. It appears 

 that Stahl and his followers, in the whole of their 

 practice, whatever may haye been asserted to the 

 contrar}^, were very much governed by their ge- 

 neral principles. Trusting to the wisdom and con- 

 stant attention of nature, they proposed the art of 

 curing diseases by 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 eincaciou"^ 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 incessant 

 and unwearied observation of the history and phe- 

 nomena of diseases, and were instrumental in di- 

 recting the attention of physicians to those salu- 

 tary efforts of nature, which cannot be too accu- 

 j ately understood, or too dihgently })ursucd in the 

 treatment of diseases. 



Frederick Hoffmann is tlie last of the three illus- 

 trious systematists whose different theories of me- 

 dicine were disclosed to the world in the beginning 



