396 Proceedings of the Poyal Society 
corded in the Proceedings of a Royal Society; nor would I advise 
patient or physician to trust much either to Dr Butter’s cure for 
St Vitus’s dance, or to the remedy which seemed to Dr Duncan to 
put an end to inveterate hiccup. The first volume of our Trans- 
actions, however, contains one able paper on a subject of pure 
practical medicine — a treatise by an eminent English physician of 
last century, Dr Hamilton of Lynn-Regis, upon the Mumps, or 
Cynanche parotidaea, a disease which had previously been little 
studied in England. But this treatise was originally produced to 
the Philosophical Society in 1773, and the Royal Society, deeming 
it worthy of publication, printed it in the Transactions. 
In the more congenial fundamental sciences of medicine, ana- 
tomy and physiology, the work done in the Society in its early 
years presents features of greater interest. Mr Blizard of London 
gives an account of an extra-uterine foetus ; Dr Monro describes a 
remarkable male monster; investigates the anatomy of hydroce- 
phalus; inquires into the communications existing between the 
ventricles of the brain — a field in which he had long before been a 
famous discoverer; explains the action of those muscles which 
consist of oblique fibres ; and narrates the results of experiments, 
among the earliest made in this country, in 1792, confirmatory of 
the immortal discovery by G-alvani of galvanic, or, as it was then 
called, animal electricity. The investigations of Dr Francis Home 
on the relative strength of tonics, and his medical experiments on 
foxglove, read in the Society, but published in a separate treatise, 
show that there is another fundamental branch of medicine proper — 
therapeutics, which may be cultivated, as a science, by physiologi- 
cal experiment, as well as by mere observation of empirical facts ; 
and until this view be taken generally by physicians of the true 
method of studying the action of remedies, medicine will make but 
little progress in this the most important of all its departments. 
There are other medical inquiries of interest to be found in the 
Society’s early Proceedings and Transactions, such as Dr Alexander 
Wilson’s paper on the action of opium on animals, and that of Dr 
James Johnston on the functions and diseases of the lymphatic 
glands. But I hasten from these and other inquiries, which might 
be usefully put in detail before a medical audience, to other topics 
of more general interest. 
