disclosed, which may hereafter lead to most important results in the treatment. The details of the ophthalmic conspiracy have never yet been published to the world. It would have been too dangerous at that time to promulgate them; but the proofs that could not be concealed ought to have read a lesson to our military authorities, which would long since have done away with the cruel conditions of services for life, and other severities of the common soldier's lot.

Wherever cruelty or injustice have been attempted in any shape, they have in the long run uniformly recoiled upon the inflictors; and happy is it even for the inflictors themselves that such should be the case, for they would otherwise be led on to the most frightful enormities.

We have seen that British soldiers did not fear even to blind themselves for the purpose of insuring their escape; and the same causes have led to similar conspiracies in the Russian, the French, the Belgic, and Dutch services; but these never extended to the same deep-laid guilt as with us, for the soldiers of the Continent had a resource and charter in their institutions of limited service, to which they always looked for protection and deliverance. Their conspiracies were short-lived, and probably would never have existed, but from their hearing of the temporary success that attended them on our side of the Channel. I cannot tell how evidence of the conspiracy ever was obtained in their armies; but the first discovery, in a military rather than in a medical sense, was said to be made amongst us in the following manner :-A regiment of the highest character (to the best of my recollection the 28th), was much afflicted with the ophthalmia; and upon some occasion of military disorder, the commanding officer took the opportunity, in a touching address, of appealing to the feelings of the men. This had such an effect that a conscience-stricken soldier, after the parade had been dismissed, waited upon his Colonel, and laid open the whole conspiracy. Without this confession and discovery, it might have been difficult ever to have obtained positive evidence of the conspiracy, although the circumstantial and presumptive proofs were in many ways so strong, that its existence could not for a moment be doubted.

I have written thus strongly on this subject through strong conviction; but I shall be ready to read my pallinode (and confess that I have been in error) whenever I see the medical staff lose their sight by the contagion, and the officers affected by it in the same way as the men.

117

OF SYPHILIS.

FOR obvious reasons this must be a prevalent disease amongst men leading the life of soldiers, and it is an interesting one, as well from the accidents it gives rise to as from its obstinate complicated nature when it appears in a constitutional form. Until our experience in the Peninsular war, there had been but one opinion amongst us of its utter incurability but by mercury, and if, through chance, the disease got well without it, we had as little hesitation in declaring that it could not possibly have been true syphilis, but some other disease putting on that form. In short, there was one specific, which was mercury, and that was to be administered, at all hazards, to all the afflicted, no matter what may have been the patient's capability of bearing the remedy, the nature of his constitution, or the sufferings it entailed. Things were in this state at the beginning of the present century, when, during the year of the peace of Amiens, I was made to accompany the late Duke of Gloucester in a tour to the north of Europe, during which we chanced to arrive at Moscow when a contest was raging there between the pro- and anti-mercurialists of the faculty, for the appointment to a syphilitic hospital that had just been founded by one of the Prince Gallitzins. His Excellency, an enlightened man, was sufficiently inclined to the first, but, before deciding, did me the honour to consult me on the occasion. I need not say to what side I inclined, or how much I wondered at what appeared to me the barbarous ignorance of the people where such a question could have been raised. I set it down, however, as one of the strange things a passing traveller often hears of, but has neither time to investigate nor understand.

Two or three years after this, when I was doing duty in the home district, on my promotion to be Deputy-Inspector of Hos

pitals, and it became my business to examine the weekly returns of the regiments in England at the Medical Board Office, we were utterly astonished on its being reported that more than one surgeon of the King's German Legion were infected with the same heresy as the non-mercurialists of Moscow! and they promptly met the treatment of heretics. Instant retraction, or expulsion from service, was the alternative.

I certainly never expected to hear more of what appeared to me so strange and pernicious a delusion; but, on my appointment to be Chief of the Medical Department to the Portuguese Auxiliary Army in the Peninsula in the year 1810, I found that the native faculty never used mercury for any primary symptoms, and very little, if any, for secondary ones, and they obstinately contended for the right and propriety of their practice. Such infatuation, as I then thought it, was not to be reasoned with. I applied to the Commander-in-Chief, and obtained the strongest general order that could be penned, ordaining the use of mercury in every stage of syphilitic diseases.

Still I was beat. Wherever I could not personally superintend, the remedy was neglected; if present, the mercury was neutralized with sulphur, and when I insisted upon seeing whether it had been rubbed in, was presented with a skin as black as an Ethiop's. At first their dislike and horror for the remedy was so great that they would rush from the room when it was applied, and wash it off with soap and water. In fact, I saw that I was playing a losing game where I could not help myself, yet at the same time I could not help acknowledging that the grave consequences I apprehended must have ensued from their preposterous conduct, did not follow, and that our soldiers, who were mercurialized I may say to extremity, often suffered them in the most lamentable degree.

Things went on in this way for about two years longer, when I was dispatched to Evora, in the Alentego, to take charge of the medical department, where I found a large hospital, under excellent management--by far the best I had ever seen in Portugal, and there the list of primary cases amounted to nearly fifty, all

of them with severe, extensive, and well-marked syphilitic ulceration, and all doing well, without ever having taken a particle of mercury, which had never been used amongst them in these stages of the disease from time immemorial. I had been, meanwhile, in the constant habit of inquiring amongst, and observing our own soldiers, and when I compared the difference of their condition, full of mercury, with that of the native troops, who never took a particle, I cannot describe the astonishment it raised. Still I could not bring myself to believe that I had lived so long in utter error, and I wrote from the spot the first English essay that had appeared in our times, of the curability of the disease without mercury amongst the Portuguese, for I durst not at first open my eyes to the whole truth; and within two years afterwards, first Mr. Rose, and then Mr. Guthrie, ventured upon bolder views, and published to the world the feasibility, propriety, and safety, of treating British soldiers in the same manner as the Portuguese.

I confess that nothing in the practice of physic ever staggered me more than this discovery: that the creed of ages should be found utterly baseless-that the wisest amongst us should have, in all the intermediate time, been destroying instead of saving their patients, by murderous and unnecessary courses of mercury— was enough to shake the firmest faith in physic, and to prove that what might seem the best established principles of medicine were no more than the delusion of the passing day. Far be it from me now to say, that mercury should be dismissed from practice in these complaints, because it has been proved that they can be cured without it; for it is still the very best remedy that ever has been discovered; but then it should be used in accordance with the rules and safety of the constitution to which it is applied. Eschew salivation in every instance, and throw away the remedy the moment it is found to disagree: do this, and I cannot conceive why, as heretofore, it should not be used in every case of primary and secondary spmptoms. To reject it in all (I may say in any), is to reject what has been shown to be by far the best remedy we have ever known, and he who does so is surely as much a bigot, and that too on the wrong side, because it will not