Now, a turtle-fed alderman might with advantage prove the truth of this last statement of Magendie. It might be the best possible treatment to abstract some of his surplus food, after it was made up into blood, if we could not persuade him to submit to the deduction at an earlier period. I was pleased to find that Magendie did not ride his hobby to death, and cut himself off from the advantage of a remedial agent capable of producing the greatest possible mischief when abused. I went on with my studies, giving up idol after idol, and resolutely refusing to think for myself-not the rarest kind of resolution by the way. At last I began to fear that the science I had chosen was a foe to all fixity. Afloat on the ocean of conjecture, I still explored with confidence, and at last, thanks to the good genius who presides over the fate of mortals in general, and medical men in particular, I discovered in the wide waste of waters an island, where were firmly fixed the great men of ancient and modern times-Medical Eclecticism! the land of rest and promise for the wise, the terror and dread of fools. I looked over the world-disease and suffering were everywhere. I saw the most earnest and gifted spirits condemned to years of darkened agony-like some rare bird, beating in sad unrest against the wiry walls of its unwelcome cage. Night, with her raven wing, and myriads of flashing worlds that gem her brow, is only night to the sick soul. Its shadows but deepen the gloom in which these are plunged, and morning brings no ray of light to them. In view of all this, my heart was filled with an unutterable pity. I looked over the field of medical science. I became conscious of the central stand point of our profession. I knew that all things are ours. The discovery" and practice of Priestnitz were bruited everywhere. I would be the last to rob Priestnitz, or any other man, of one ray of glory; but let any one examine the history of medicine which is contained in the medical books from Hippocrates downward, and he will find the facts and philosophy of Water Cure scattered through a large number of these works.

Hippocrates, the father of medicine, used water in his treatment of disease. His plan was, to pour water over the patient and then clothe him warmly, and bear testimony to the cure of cramp, conthus produce perspiration. His works vulsions, gout and tetanus. Galen, who lived in the second century, cured fevers with water only. Celsus recommends water for the cure of certain diseases. Boerhaave recommends the use of water to render the body firm and strong. Hoffman, a contemporary of Boerhaave, wrote on Water for the cure of disease. His words are, "If there exist anything in the world that can be called a panacea, it is pure water."

Hahn, a German physician of note, wrote a work on the Curative Effects of Water, in 1738. Hahn mentions an inveterate case of itch, which was cured by wrapping the patient in a wet sheet, and bathing several times a day. He gives instances of the remarkable cure of St. Anthony's fire, cancerous ulcers, small pox, and the whole family of exanthemata. He also cured many cases of insanity with water.

One of the best works on Water is that of James Currie, M. D., F. R S., of Liverpool, published in 1797. Rev. John Wesley published a work on Water in 1747. Mr. Wesley gives a list of eighty diseases curable by water. Indeed, he prescribes for almost every disease, and this, perhaps, is the greatest error of modern hydropathy. It is pretty certain that "douche," and "umschlay lein tuch," will never mend broken bones, perhaps they will not grow deficient brains, though we heard a good lady, some time since, seriously recommend Water Cure to a gentleman, to wash the cobwebs out of his brain, that he might see with greater clearness sundry of her radical notions. The gentleman probably thought that the " consummation" was not very "devoutly to be hoped for," even were it possible. But commend us to harmless hobbies, neither mulish nor asinine. And with this devout aspiration, we wash our hands of Water Cure.

I am a sad dreamer, and in my waking dreams, I often live over many of the scenes of my life. I just now remember a case that occurred in my practice soon after I commenced the very responsible business of thinking for myself. comes before me like a vision of bright and dark things. Oh! the many and

It

blessed charities that cheer the rude way and the often unwelcome labor of the man who professes to poison people into health. One bitter winter night, I sat, half-slumbering, over the ashes of an exhausted coal fire, dozing and dreaming, not of death's heads, or cross bones, or pills, powders, sick-rooms and skeleton heads, but of a moving panorama of bright things, a glare of lights, the whirl of beautiful forms, the sweetness of the most bewitching melody, in the pauses of which a heaven of harmony was reproduced in my soul. I had just left all this at an early hour comparatively, for I felt the responsibilities of my profession, but I could not leave it. It was all "burned into my consciousness." I sat, in my dreamy, half-slumber, in my room, which was cold, cheerless and dark, but the roseate hues of light enveloped me. My world was of the heart. I thanked God that I was a man, not a philosopher. I seemed to rest on a purple cloud, in a far-off heaven of bliss.

"What happy things are youth, and love, and sunshine:

How sweet to feel the sun upon the heart,
To know it lighting up the rosy blood,
And with all joyous feelings, prism-hued,
Making the dark breast shine like a spar
grot.

We walk among the sunbeams as with angels."

Reader, the plain English of all this is, I was beginning to get in love. Yes, I have had my turn of the tender passion, and like measles and small-pox, I am sure it can take but once with me. But this sort of constitution that resists the soft infection the second time, or even the second score of times, is very rare. Indeed, I recollect to have somewhere read of a heart that was like an old English burying-ground, so full that it was shut up from farther interments-sad, sepulchral hearts, full of dead things, are there! But there I sat, by those dim embers, and dreamed of what had floated before me at Mrs. H.'s party. But all was indistinct, though beautiful, except one bright form. An ethereal creature was she, and I could not class her with the denizens of earth (par parenthese). I saw her by candle-light. Descriptions of beauty are too threadbare for a Medical Eclectic. Besides, I have never known them to operate as a tonic to a susceptible gentleman, or a cosmetic to an ugly lady. But the fairy form

that fixed my wandering attention at Mrs. H.'s, deserves a passing notice; and to make more plain what is to come hereafter, reader, you must consent to be introduced to her. A crowd of gentlemen had gathered about her; and the clear, silver music of her voice was only equaled by the beauty of the thoughts she expressed. She realized my dream of an Italian Improvisatrice. She was a second Corinne to me. She spoke as one who had deep knowledge of life. Whence had one so young and so unworldly such knowledge Her conversation was true poetry, for it was wisdom incarnated in beauty. How the depth and fullness of life, present and prospective, were opened to me, as I listened to her. I made one of a most admiring, yes, adoring, circle. Our homage was evidently appreciated, for it seemed that the sparks of living fire fell in showers from her eyes, as she kept up the most intensely intellectual converse, now bright with a delectable wit, now deep with the most exquisite pathos. I felt that she had

"Vowed she would crop the world for me, and lay it

Herself before me even as a flower."

She seemed to be some twenty years of age; her complexion was a pearly, transparent white; a liquid lustre shot from her eyes; her swan-like neck was bare enough for statuary; her arms, rounded and Venus-like, were shaded only with delicate lace, which seemed like a thin mist on a wreath of snow.

Beautiful being! she possessed my bachelor soul, as the spirits of mischief possessed the room that was swept and garnished in olden times. I very unceremoniously hid her in my heart and took her to my room to blissen my dreams. At a very late hour I awoke to mortal consciousness, and sought my pillow with thoughts and feelings,

"Like rays of stars that meet in space, And mingle in a bright embrace."

I was just deepened into dreamless slumber, when the startling tinkle, jingle, jangle of my bell awoke me. "No. 364,

B

St., Lady very ill," was the servant's message. I dressed in haste, and soon stood by the bedside of the sufferer. She lay enveloped in the white drapery of her couch-a thin, emaciated, and almost transparent hand lay nearly lifeless upon the counterpane. The slightest possible flutter of the pulse was perceptible. I

looked upon the fallen, relaxed and deathy face-her eyes were closed, and the shut lids were continually contracted 'by spasmodic action of the nerves. A premature age seemed to have shrunk and wrinkled her face. There were no circular lines in that countenance. All was angular as misery. Could I have read death in her face I should have been relieved-oh! how much. But I saw that she would not die-certainly not yet. It was not suffering that was written in every line of her face; it was agony. A shudder passed over her, and an attendant removed the drapery to alter her position. My eye fell upon a diamond cross that sparkled upon her exposed neck-this, and the lace clinging upon her bare and lifeless arms, revealed to me the beauty and belle of the evening at Mr. H.'s. Terrible revealing! My spirit was stirred to its very depths. The words of the poet were traced, as by a breath of flame, upon her:

"Oh! I have suffered till my brain became Distinct with wo-as is the skeleton leaf, Whose green hath fretted off its fibrous

frame

And bare to our immortality of grief."

I had seen change and suffering. I had seen those sudden transitions which scare the strong man-but I had never seen anything to be compared with what was now before me.

The attendant seemed perfectly at home, and as quiet as if the whole were an every-day scene.

"She'll be better soon-she is always better after she takes her powders," and she removed a glass which I glanced into. I saw a very large dose of morphine remaining as a sediment. The whole flashed upon me in an instant. I had been so absorbed in the symptoms that I had not noted them. Now I told them one by one, as we hold our breath, and contemplate those landmarks of Christian progress, the gallows, the gibbet, and the rack.

But what business had I here? The lightning had struck. But why speak thus? The apparently blasted and dead of the fiery fluid, have been saved by the affusion of cold water. Might there not be a mental lavatory, or lustration, which might save even here.

Slowly, almost imperceptibly, the faint, flickering pulse became distinct animation returned to the shrunken features. I held the thin hand in mine, but

no life seemed to flow into it, though she slowly unclosed her eyes and looked into my face. A slight shudder passed over her as she recognized me, and she shaded her eyes with her hand, as if she were determined not to see me. It is said that in moments of great suffering and peril, a life is crowded into a point of time. I recognized the truth of this saying as 1 stood by the bedside of Mrs. Waters. What an ideal I had cherished but an hour before, and now the terrible actual had taken its place.

She seemed to have a consciousness of my state, and convulsively grasping my hand with her cold fingers, she said:

66

Terror, madness, crime, remorse." "Abandoned hope, and love that turns to hate,

And self-contempt, bitterer to drink than blood;

Pain whose unheeded and familiar speech Is howling, and keen shrieks day after day, And hell, or the sharp fear of hell."

And then the coiling snakes that seemed writhing in her features, sunk away to something like rest, and she said:

"Soul is not more polluted than the beams

Of heaven's pure orb."

She raised her eyes with something of earnestness to my face: "Doctor," said she, "the light passes through all the 'taint of earth-born atmospheres' unstained. My soul is pure and true, though you see me weighed down with ill-unable to sustain any but the falsest life, and unable to die."

I laid my hand upon her head. I tried to speak. I was ashamed of my emotion. I knew that I was expected to prescribe for my patient.

But why should I prescribe for her? The only thing I could have done with any wisdom, or peace, would have been to order a warm bath to expel the poison. This she would have resisted with the strength of insanity, or she would have doubled her next potion. I knew, too well, that no medicine could produce any desirable effect, with all the tissues loaded with morphine. I was more embarrassed-more at a loss than I had ever been. But something must be done-I mechanically dealt out some powders of calcined magnesia and left to seek my cold and darkened room, with no light of the soul to cheer it. It is astonishing

how much light a man may radiate upon the world around him, especially if the lady he admires is beside him. A golden glory rests on the landscape, cowslips are a great deal yellower, brooks gurgle much more musically and smoke curls more gracefully. In short, Edens are only such when blessed with an Eve.

The next day I called on my patient in very prosaic daylight. There had been no twilight in my experience with the lady. I had passed from the glare of high noon to black midnight. I was somewhat unprepared to meet a beautiful, faded, very interesting woman of forty years of age. Though I should not have thought her over thirty, so slight and youthful was her appearance. The first impression that came forcibly to me after entering her room, was that she was at the mercy of all impressions--with a soul great enough for all effort, she had been so bound by untoward conditions, that no legitimate action was possible to her. Her life had been intensified by being thrown back upon itself. With the freedom and plainness of truthful youth, she told me her history. It was the same tale of passion that all great natures must always have to tell. She had loved -Death had taken the loved one and her heart had preyed upon itself, because the motive power of her nature was not required for the varied and legitimate exercise of her faculties. She could not bear the misery of her life. She took morphine; this gave her a factitious pleasure, the brilliancy and agony which I had witnessed.

Her life, or rather her living death, can never be described. No description can describe it; and I am not one to attempt the impossible.

When I entered the room, a delicate lady with a pale yellow complexion, in which was the slightest possible tinge of red, with a most attenuated waist and a sharp cough was sitting by the bedside. A stand and waiter was beside her, on which was spread all sorts and sizes of medicated lozenges. I had, evidently put a stop to any quantity of eloquence upon the virtues of these panaceas. "Doctor," said Mrs. Waters, "only see how kind Mrs. Hunter is; she has brought me all these nice medicines." I felt a pride too professional to make any inquiry as to articles spread before me, but the garrulity of an idle woman, notwithstanding she was somewhat afraid of "the Doctor" and wished very heartily,

that she had hid the mischief before I came, would not allow me to remain unenlightened. There was camphor, and calomel, winter-green, and wourali, for aught I know.

I made a longer stay than was my custom, and saw the sickly lady depart with pleasure, and then I endeavored to make Mrs. Waters aware of the exceeding folly of still farther taxing her diseased system with health-destroying substances though called medicinal. With a mind exceedingly clear on most subjects, she was a child with respect to the economy of the human system, the laws of health, or the healing art. Like too many others she looked to a physician when ill, with as blind a faith, as that with which the ancients consulted their oracles, or the Indian his "medicine man." And though she failed always of receiving any lasting benefit, she went on trying old and new medicines, and old and new doctors, with a zeal worthy a better fate, and a faith which did not fail, because it was continually fed by hope. Thus are the most unreasonable and discouraging demands made upon the Medical Profession-a profession which, when rightly understood and practiced, is one of the noblest in the world. But now men and women absurdly expect their physician to create health for them, whilst they do nothing but manufacture disease. We find at the point of progress which man has now reached, that there is no orderly, or balanced development of his faculties. When the perversion, or want of balance is excessive, we recognize it as a cause of disease. We look with pity upon the bloated and tremulous debauchee. We see how his disease has been produced. Why should a high degree of civilization uniformly produce an exaltation, and exacerbation of every form of disease known to the primitive condition of man, whilst at the same time, new ills whose name is legion, spring into being before us. Civic life is frightfully fruitful in ill health. The army of diseases is in disproportion to everything but the army of doctors.

That system of medicine which deals in simple remedies, of whatever kind, which does not embrace psychology and a complete mental philosophy will fail, in nine cases out of ten, of curing disease, and succeed by chance in curing the tenth.

But what was I to do for the beautiful

ruin before me? If I could, by any course of treatment, expel the poison from her system, I could by no means secure to her that mode of life which should exercise her glorious powers, and save her from the living death of inaction. And what would have seemed most wonderful to an unthoughtful observer, was the fact that she saw with perfect clearness her state and its causes, and at the same time that she was blindly putting herself at the mercy of every quack who made pretensions to some new nostrum of wonderful efficacy.

I flatter myself that I have some knowledge of mental philosophy, but the mingled wisdom and ignorance of this wonderful woman astonished me. To see a woman surrounded by pretenders to magnetic and mesmeric science, depending on morphine and Moffat's Life Pills, and employing a physician with no more of an understanding appreciation of him than she had of the crowd of quacks, and the endless procession of nostrums with which she was surrounded, and yet conversing upon life and its phenomena, with a far-reaching wisdom and a brilliant beauty, was more than I was prepared for.

Doctor," said she, "had I the power to make conditions for myself, I would have health. The causes of disease must be sought in the conditions and habits that men make for themselves. If there is no healthy development of the material nature, through legitimate exercise or industry, the body is not reproduced in a healthy manner, and the mental condition is proved to be far from sane or sound by the fact that there is not sufficient wisdom to furnish such material conditions as shall insure healthy development. We may take the vitiated air in our cities as an example of want of wisdom, and rightly directed effort. In the present state of society, no efficient medical police is possible. The more gross and terrible miasmas may be removed by the degree of corporate action to which we have attained. But, Doctor, we see all too plainly for our peace, that all regulations possible at this day, with regard to those conditions which we see are essential to health, fall lamentably short of attaining for man what unitary action can alone accomplish. And so dim and distant look those conditions, which we see are essential to our well-being, that balanced development and universal health seem the wildest of all utopian dreams."

I confess I listened with something of surprise to remarks like these from one, who, with all her power to reason, had no power to act.

The very next day, when I called, I found her interested deeply in an account of a new German doctor, with a name the most unmusical and unpronounceable of any that has been imported. The patron of the new doctor was a man I had met occasionally at places where the best dinners" are eaten. I had amused myself by setting down the items of his bill of fare. He was in very delicate health, and so he never ate delicately. Like Mr. Gobbler, he never had any stomach; and yet, strange paradox, his stomach always troubled him. I had seen him eat soup and salmon, oil and vine gar, ham and eggs, roast pig-all sorts of poultry—a half-dozen incomprehensible French dishes, as many more unmentionable American horrors; and then the man had the audacity to complain of being ill, as if it were possible for him to be anything else. But just now he was particularly dazzled by the foreshine of perfect health. Mr. Feeder was a relative of Mrs. Waters, and, as such, he made large demands upon her faith on the present occasion, and large quotations from her larder. The character of the lunch he was leisurely discussing in Mrs. W.'s room, so as not to deprive her of a moment of his precious company, was unique, as far as my observation of lunches extends. I really trembled for the little light chair, which looked as though it must have the gift of breaking down under the composite infliction of the rotund invalid and his comprehensive luncheon. He breathed thick and short, and loosened his neckcloth as he ate a plate of oysters, an ice cream, some blancmange, a bologna sausage, a cold tongue, a sandwich and some sardines, and sponge cake and fruit cake. He had his hand on his side whenever it could be spared from his mouth and his plate, and, in the intervals of deglutition, he entertained Mrs. Waters and myself with an account of his new doctor, a celebrated homeopa thist, who has improved him wonderfully within the last month. He had given up his calomel, and his quinine, and his weekly bleeding, and the black draught, and the saline draught, and the Congress water, and the morphine at night, and the effervescing draught in the morning, and his dinner pill, and the doctor's frequent calls, and confined himself to the