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F. 8. BILLINGS 
hsemorragica 11 of English writers, is not contagions , and that 
with attention to ventilation and cleanliness we have no need to 
isolate patients complicated in this manner. Even if this disease 
were characterized by similar path-anatomical phenomena to the 
typhus of man, still we dare not call it identical , although in 
such a case we might be justified in speaking of typhus of the 
horse, but not infer an identity thereby. But in reality, so long 
as diseases are not identical in the etiological sense, it will be 
much better for comparative pathology for us to have ontogenetic 
names instead of longing for analogies. 
A word as to the word “fever” It is time, and among 
intelligent mediciners it is the case, that “ termini technici ” 
indicative of specific fevers be dropped from patliic nomencla¬ 
ture—in reality there is no such things as typhus fever and 
intermittent fever. Although this last form which fever phe¬ 
nomena assume has more of the specific about it than any other, 
hence it is that we find intelligent and thinking mediciners 
speaking of “ typhus,” of “ intermittent.” Every educated 
person knows these diseases are bound with fever; the fever 
is a general condition varying in intensity accompanying various 
forms of disturbance. The ^etiological momenta are specific, 
but not the fever. Other phenomena, as the “ ulcera typhosa ” 
of “typhus abdominalis” of man, the variolse, may be said 
to specifically belong to certain diseases, but fever is common 
to them all. Generalization in pathology is something very 
few men dare indulge in, for the amount of knowledge nec¬ 
essary before one is prepared for such work is something only the 
Virchows of the world are capable of. The great men of the 
past, and present also, have all fallen into serious mistakes of 
generalization. Bichat generalized his “ serosae ” to an undue 
extent, Audral his “ exudations,” and Rokitamsky his “ croupose 
productions ”; and to-day the medical world is inclined to let all 
pus generate by the “ marcliing-out theory of Cohenheimf not 
that these men and others have not seen what they report, but 
that the reported facts and theories drawn from them are too 
exclusively extended over the entire phenomena which are open 
to our study. 
