234 Epidemics. 



Trousseau, Paget, Greaves, Marshall Hall, Prout, 

 Abercrombie, and Liebig may be instanced as a few out of 

 many from which all branches of medicine have received an 

 impulse and a kind of tincture and bias, either from the 

 facts they have brought out in a prominent manner, or from 

 the methods they have pursued in arriving at the conclusions 

 they have enunciated to the world. 



Added to these is that undefinable something which 

 personal observation acquires, or sifts and analyses, which 

 no amount of reading and study can ever supply or engrave 

 upon the mind with half the strength, or with equal 

 accuracy and due appreciation of the real and doubtful from 

 the decidedly fictitious. Therefore, taking all matters into 

 consideration, it is contended that gradually from 1823 on 

 to 1833 blood-letting was gently on the wane, from which 

 time, by Marshall Hall's work upon blood-letting, it got a 

 first decisive check ; from thence till 1841 it got a more 

 decided check, chiefly from fevers sustaining blood-letting 

 less and less. Cases which appeared to do well at the first 

 from the bleeding, as they advanced towards their end (third 

 week), manifested such exhausted powers of life, that fatality 

 was decidedly greater in typhoid and typhus fever in those 

 who were bled than those not bled. From this time 

 onwards bleeding was gradually falling into disgrace, and 

 after 1854 it may be said that it was, as a universal and 

 beneficial remedy, thoroughly condemned ; from thence and 

 onwards in Great Britain it is only occasionally resorted to, 

 and under circumstances of very mature consideration, with 

 the greatest regard to the quantity to be withdrawn at the 

 time. 



On the Continent, especially the south of France, Italy, 

 and Spain, blood-letting is still much practised ; but the 

 leaning to frequent neuralgia, and general proneness to 

 disease and local inflammation in those who have been 



