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too little remains to carry on the business of the body, then death occurs by sudden shock; or if, through ignorance, carelessness, or false theory, there is an insufficient supply of material to take the place of the killed blood, the loss of vitality occurs more slowly. And occurring more slowly, it usually affects some part more than another; there is congestion and inflammation-that is, local death-of the digestive viscera, or of the lungs, or of the brain, and the patient's decease is assigned by name to that last cause. Thus, in fever, the blood relapses into a less organic form by reason of its vitality being destroyed by a morbid poison.

Let us next look for an instance of imperfect life in the blood through arrest of development. There is a condition, unfortunately very common, which medical men call Anæmia. The word means literally "bloodlessness," but in reality relates rather to deficient quality than deficient quantity. The circulating fluid cannot well help filling up the hollow vessels which contain it, but it is wanting in the most highly organised, the most truly living of its constituents. It is pale, from the diminished numbers of those floating red globules which give its natural hue. This capital of red globules is by far the most important portion of the blood; so much so, indeed, that it may be taken as a direct measure of corporeal and mental vigour; a man possesses a larger proportion than a woman, a strong man more than a weak man, an adult more than a youth or an ancient, a patient after recovery more than during his sickness of whatever kind, a horse in high condition more than when brought up from grass.

Considering, therefore, its importance, it is astonishing to find how much this capital may be encroached upon without a bankruptcy. For example, Dr Andral has analysed the blood of a patient with anæmia, where the blood-globules amounted to less than 39 parts in 1000, whereas

VOL. XCI.-NO. DLIX.

their natural proportion should be at least 120 parts in 1000. More than two-thirds of this constituent was missing! And yet the patient was living and moving, and very likely quite recovered in the end if rational treatment was adopted. Now, in pure anæmia there is not found any degenerated devitalised substance; the missing globules have not relapsed into a lower life, so that their ruins or debris should constitute a foreign morbid matter; but they have, in fact, been used up in the regular way, to supply materials for the tissues, as they are moulted off from day to day. At the same time, there has been a want of renewal, an arrest of the continuous development of the blood, which is necessary to complete life.

Pure anæmia has been spoken of; but, as might have been expected, this defective supply of the materials of growth much weakens the vitality of many of the manufacturing and excreting viscera. The liver is not so lively as it should be, and some of the colour it ought to get rid of remains in the blood, chronically staining the skin of a bilious hue. Or perhaps the kidneys work only half-time, and the urea which they ought to drain off is retained, causing a very serious derangement of health. Thus there is a mixed pathology in these cases, a combination of arrested life, and of a relapse into a lower life; the life of the organ is diminished, and it leaves behind, in the system, substances of inferior vitality which it is its business to excrete or separate.

Or again, anæmia may so depress the creative power of the blood, that instead of the structure of the body being built up with elastic and vitalised fibrin, it has to put up with a cheesy brittle substance called tubercle. This is just the sort of fraud a rascally contractor commits, when he lays your floors on halfdried timbers. Your beams are destroyed by dry-rot, and the lungs. in which tubercle has been substituted for healthy connective tissue, gradually soften and break up. The

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effectual remedy in both instances is to look after the builders, to preserve the honesty of the one and the vitality of the other.

It is obvious that, if various accidental circumstances direct to various parts of the body even these few elementary forms of disease which there is space to mention here, a great variety of abnormal phenomena might be produced. Though there is only one way of being right, there are thousands of ways of being wrong. These thousands of ways of being wrong have received much attention from minds with a taste for order; they have been classified into groups; and if, unfortunately, the orderly mind was afflicted with a theory, sadly have facts suffered sometimes by the Procrustean bed into which they have been forced. On the whole, perhaps, these Nosoλoyo (people who talk about diseases) have been a convenience, for their nomenclature often enables us to describe in one word what otherwise would require a parenthesis. But their labours have had this bad result; they have assigned a positive existence to that which, in reality, is a negation. "A Disease" under their manipulation, instead of being a mode in which life is deficient, becomes an actual motive power; the giving it a generic and specific name associates it in our minds with the subjects of a naturalist's studies, and we get to attribute to it individual characteristics, and to allot to it individual actions. The consequences have been very much those which would follow, in optics, the regarding a shadow as a material object instead of as an absence of light; or, in general physics, the accounting cold an active agent. The disease came to be considered as an enemy to be fought against; all the phenomena classified among its appurtenances were viewed as actions to be opposed and checked; and, in short, all the attention was directed to the removal of death, instead of to the replacement of life. Each

mode of erring from health was reared up into an entity instead of an abstraction-a separate foe, requiring special weapons for his discomfiture.

Less harm than might have been feared has been done by these false notions. In the first place, patients are tougher than usually supposed, and will stand a deal of wrong treatment; and, secondly, experience has somewhat checked the bold hand of a relentless logic. Still, it can hardly be doubted that the increased chance of recovery under professional treatment has not been what might have been expected from the advance of science. But of late medical art appears to have turned over a new leaf; nosologists are at a discount, and under the influence of that modern rational pathology, of which a popular sketch is attempted in these pages, attention seems directed to the maintenance of life in the body more than to the expulsion of death out of it. Such seems to be the intention of all the modes of treatment which, without falling in with the dogmas of any particular "pathy," have yet been silently adopted by the rational adherents of each within the last few years. We may instance the care bestowed upon the selection of alimentary substances, the use of water, of oxygen, of iron, of animal oils, of chlorine, of soda in doses more like a food than a drug, of lactic and other organic acids, of salts of phosphorus and lime, of sulphur, ammonia, bile, pepsin, and several other agents established by common consent without being suggested by any previous theory of therapeutics, or traditional rules of the medical art.

These are constituents of the animal frame, and are administered and trusted to as supplying obvious abnormal deficiencies of matter.

A living body may be compared to a stately and extensive mansion, constructed of beautiful but very perishable materials, all of which need continual repair to keep up the form and usefulness of the

structure. All the materials are
perishable, but in different degrees,
and with different rapidity. The
permanent Architect is the indwell-
ing Life, and he best performs his
duty, not by fits and starts of work,
but by continuous vigilant industry.
He should be every moment re-
moving decaying materials from
the walls and working machinery,
to be carted away at convenient
periods, and every moment supply-
ing their place by fresh. Thus
there are two departments carried
on simultaneously-the Destructive
and Constructive business; and
upon their harmony and com-
pleteness depends the perfection
of life which we call health.
are necessary; but the deficiency of
both or of either, or the preponder
ance of one over the other in vari-
ous parts, or their deficiency in
one part while others remain active,
constitutes a deficiency of life-a
disease.

Both

With the destructive department we are best acquainted. We have possessed from time immemorial a long list of drugs, which are classified according to the organ through whose portals they promote destructive metamorphosis. Sudorifics, emetics, purgatives, diuretics, expectorants, &c., are familiar to doctors and amateurs; while others, as mercury for example, are known as general liquifacients, which promote destructive metamorphosis generally, and a consequent increase of solid evacuation from all quarters. We are in possession also of some agents which arrest this metamorphosis, such as alcohol, opiates, astringents-some acting on one part and some on another and when construction does not keep pace with destruction-when the latter is not, indeed, too fast absolutely, but too fast comparativelywe apply them empirically with advantage, so as to keep the two in harmony. By this interference, rationally interposed, we may assist the architect much in one half of

his duty, and thus, perhaps, contribute in an indirect way towards making him more active in the other half. At all events, by the judicious use of destructives and arresters of metamorphosis, we may, in the first case, make room for, and in the second case allow time for, normal renewal of the tissues.

But the Constructive pharmacopœia is sadly defective. Since the swindling alchemists brought discredit on the search, ridicule has always been attached to the hope of there being in nature reagents capable of directly and generally augmenting the vital power of growth, of acting on the constructive renewal of the body-as mercury, for instance, does on the destructive. Yet there is, a priori, no absurdity in the idea. How, except by experiment, could it have been known that a small pinch of such a thing as calomel possessed the power of doubling vital decay? And how, therefore, can any one foreknow that the other part of vitality is incapable of being immediately acted upon? All we can say is, that such an agent has certainly not yet been found: for if such were the case, no power short of Omnipotence could suppress the knowledge a few months would spread the news over the whole civilised world, and bring into universal use the Elixir of Life.

"The Elixir of Life"-the very words make the reader smile condescendingly, as when he reads the fairy literature of his nursery. He associates it directly with magic, unlawful arts, and some secret wrung from spiritual natures, by which their immortality might be suddenly acquired for flesh and blood. This idea is purely derived from romances, and was never entertained or thought of by the Rosicrucians, who were as firm believers as we can be in the divine scheme which makes death a necessary step to eternal life.* What they really sought for was a sub

* The Christianity of alchemists is stontly defended by Robert Fludd (Robertus

stance which would directly restore the deficient vitality of bodies rendered unequal to their duties by an abnormal state. They saw clearly enough that such a substance, or such a set of substances, would be an all-powerful direct healer of all disease-a Panacea not by destroying a poison, but by conferring vitality-in short, an Elixir of Life. They saw that, to the healthy flesh, various material substances in the shape of meat and drink actually supplied life; when they were taken away, the life diminished; when they were replaced, it increased. Why should they not ransack the material world which God has given us to be ransacked, to know if there did not exist something which would in the same way restore life to these same parts when they failed through weakness? They had no notion of abolishing death as the final end of all living beings, but simply of abolishing unnecessary death, and of enabling the machinery of the body to attain the term which it is originally constructed to last. Vitality, as we see, is in very various quantities in the body at various times now abundant, now deficient. Material substances increase and diminish it was it, then, madness to believe in the possibility of finding the best mode of directly increasing it? Truly, the medieval men of science wasted their time, and saved ours, in their search for a substance which could do this we know now all pure substances, and we know there is none capable of it. But may not the same object be attained by the discovery of a great principle of guidance in treating the diseased body?-great, and therefore simple; and because simple, therefore as yet utterly un

thought of. Surely the direction of science towards such an object is not ridiculous.

In the mean time, let us not be idle; let us make the nearest approach possible to the desired goal by the use of indirect means. The fact of having the goal before us will make those means more efficacious. For example, we can, by the study of pathology, find out what special material is wanting in each morbid state, and we can provide an ample supply of that, so that the vital power may not have cause to complain that it cannot build for lack of bricks. Where the special material is beyond our crude manufacturing power, we may supply something as near it in nature as we can. Then we may bring the passages by which these materials enter the body-the absorbents and lacteals-into their highest state of activity. We may take care, for instance, that the thoroughfare to them is not impeded by a layer of mucus on the membrane. And we may also by a class of medicines, which act specially on the mucous membranes, and are popularly called "tonics," recall them to a true sense of their duties. We may even in some cases sanction the employment of "destructives" to clear the tissues of effete worn-out materials, which are stopping the way of construction. By these indirect means empiricism has already led us to effect much, and doubtless rational science will teach us to effect more, now that it is in the right road. And thus, without finding the Elixir of Life, we may, laboriously and indirectly, but rationally, still answer to some extent the prayer of the sick psalmist, "Renew my age."

de Fluctibus) in his Tractatus apologeticus integritatem Societatis de Rosea Cruce defendens. Lugd. Batav., 1617.'

CHRONICLES OF CARLINGFORD: SALEM CHAPEL.

PART IV. CHAPTER XII.

For

"WHAT has happened? heaven's sake tell me, mother," cried Vincent, as she sank back, wiping her eyes, and altogether overpowered, half with the trouble which he did not know, half with the joy of seeing him again-" say it out at once, and don't keep me in this dreadful suspense. Susan? She is not married? What is wrong?"

"Oh, my dear boy!" said Mrs Vincent, recovering herself, but still trembling in her agitation-"oh, my affectionate boy, always thinking of us in his good heart! No, dear. It's it's nothing particular happened. Let me compose myself a little, Arthur, and take breath."

"But, Susan ?" cried the excited young man.

"Susan, poor dear!-she is very well; and-and very happy up to this moment, my darling boy," said Mrs Vincent," though whether she ought to be happy under the circumstances or whether it's only a cruel trick-or whether I haven't been foolish and precipitate-but my dear, what could I do but come to you, Arthur? I could not have kept it from her if I had stayed an hour longer at home. And to put such a dreadful suspicion into her head, when it might be all a falsehood, would have only been killing her; and, my dear boy, now I see your face again, I'm not so frightened, and surely it can be cleared up, and all will be well."

Vincent, whose anxiety conquered his impatience, even while exciting it, kneeled done by his mother's side and took her hands, which still trembled, into his own. "Mother, think that I am very anxious; that I don't know what you are referring to; and that the sudden sight of you has filled me with all sort of terrors-for I know you would not lightly take such a journey all by yourself," said the young man,

growing still more anxious as he thought of it-" and try to collect your thoughts and tell me what is wrong."

His mother drew one of her hands out of his, laid it on his head, and fondly smoothed back his hair. "My dear good son! you were always so sensible-I wish you had never left us," she said, with a little groan; "and indeed it was a great thought to undertake such a journey; and since I came here, Arthur, Í have felt so flurried and strange, that I have not, as you see, even taken off my bonnet; but I think now you've come, dear, if you would ring the bell and order up the tea? When I see you, and see you looking so well, Arthur, it seems as if things could never be so bad, you know. My dear," she said at last, with a little quiver in her voice, stopping and looking at him with a kind of nervous alarm, "it was about Mr Fordham, you may be sure."

"Tea directly," said Vincent to the little maid, who appeared just at this crisis, and who was in her turn alarmed by the brief and peremptory order. "What about Mr Fordham ?" he said, helping his mother to take off the cloak and warm wraps in which she had been, in her nervous tremor and agitation, sitting wrapped up while she waited his return.

"Oh, my dear, my dear," cried poor Mrs Vincent, wringing her hands, "if he should not turn out as he ought, how can I ever forgive myself? I had a kind of warning in my mind the first time he came to the house, and I have always dreamt such uncomfortable dreams of him, Arthur. Oh! if you only could have seen him, my dear boy! But he was such a gentleman, and had such ways. I am sure he must have mixed in the very highest so

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