
212 NATURE AND LIFE. 
The eighteenth century obediently followed in the sci- 
ences the impulse given by the preceding age. At that. 
period Borden, with his Béarnese fire and his sparkling 
genius for medicine, made the use of mineral waters popu- 
lar, particularly that of the sulphur and thermal springs 
of the Pyrenees, perhaps the most powerful of all. He 
recommended them for drinking, and made them famous 
by the talent with which he cleverly displayed their effects. 
Great Italian physicians studied the action of quinine 
very closely. Dating from the seventeenth century, opium 
gained an extraordinary popularity. The famous Syden- 
ham, describing the epidemic dysentery of the years from 
1669 to 1672, exclaims, after describing the preparation 
of the laudanum which has kept his name: “ I cannot re- 
frain from congratulating the human race that the Omnipo- 
tent has made it the gift of this remedy, which is apt for a 
greater number of cases than any other is, and excels ail 
others in efficacy. Without it, the healing art would cease 
to be.” Yet the effects of this remedy called forth long 
and passionate disputes, with which the name of Brown is 
connected. This doctor, who lectured at Edinburgh in the 
middle of the eighteenth century, there taught a theory 
of the effects of opium, which so carried his scholars away 
that they set up a statue to him, with these words carved 
on the pedestal: ‘‘ Opium, assuredly, does not soothe.” 
Brown indeed vehemently denied the sedative virtues of 
poppy-juice. He classed it among the stimulants, and, to 
prove himself in the right, swallowed enormous doses of it 
at his lectures whenever his fluency flagged. In that same 
school at Edinburgh, Cullen too was a professor, one of 
the great physicians of the eighteenth century. To him 
we owe the discovery of the chief property of digitalis, 
which is to check the movements of the heart, and conse- 
quently lessen the rapidity of the pulse. Before this, 
Withering and Charies Darwin had recognized its diuretic 

