But who can scoff

At a very bad cough?

If you have a fever, you're laid on the shelf,
To be sure-but then you pity yourself,

And your friends' anxiety highly excited,
The curtains are drawn, and the chamber lighted,
Dimly, and softly, pleasanter far,

Than the starving sunshine that seems to jar
Every nerve into a separate knock,

And all at our mortal calamities mock.

Ever pitied a man for blowing his nose?
Yet, what minor trial could ever be worse-
Unless it be reading this blundering verse,
Never fit to be written, or read;
No-nor said,

Except by a man-with a cold in his head!"

Among the long list of cases in the Materia Medica, here is a new and fatal one: During the prevalence of the cholera in Ireland, a soldier, hurrying into the mess-room, told his commanding officer that his brother had been carried off, two days ago, by a fatal malady, expressing his apprehensions that the whole regiment would be exposed to a similar danger, in the course of the following week. "Good heavens !" ejaculated the officer, "what, then, did he die of ?" "Why, your honor, he died of a Tuesday."

An extraordinary case, chronicled by Punch, was that of a voracious individual who bolted a door, and threw up a window !

There are other maladies that afflict us, which sometimes provoke the mirth rather than the pity of our friends; for instance, how comical are the capers of a victim of St. Vitus' dance, or the more miserable one of intemperance, when he labors to preserve the perpendicular, or to disguise his condition. But we must not sport with human woe-rather deplore its presence, and seek to aid in its reduction, if not expulsion.

The priest and the physician have enough to do in the mitigation of moral and physical evil. The author of the Tin Trumpet justly observes :

"There would be but little comfort for the sick, either in body or in mind, were there any truth in the averment, that philosophy, like medicine, has plenty of drugs and quack-medicines, but few remedies, and hardly any specifics. So far from admitting this discouraging statement, a panacea may be prescribed which, under ordinary circumstances, will generally prevent, and rarely fail to alleviate, most of our evils. The following are the simple ingredients: occupation for the mind, exercise for the body, temperance and virtue for the sake of both. This is the magnum arcanum of health and happiness. Half of our illness and misery arises from the perversion of that reason which was given to us as a protection against both."

The celebrated Dumoulin remarked, on his death-bed, that he should leave behind him three distinguished physiciansWater, Exercise, and Diet. Sir Philip Sidney defines health in these words: "Great temperance, open air, easy labor, little care."

Hood thus playfully prescribes: "Take precious care of your precious health; but how, as the housewife says, to make it keep? Why, then, don't smoke-dry it, or pickle it in everlasting acids, like the Germans. Don't bury it in a potato-pit, like the Irish. Don't preserve it in spirits, like the barbarians. Don't salt it down, like the Newfoundlanders. Don't pack it in ice, like Captain Rack. Don't parboil it like gooseberries. Don't pot, and don't hang it. A rope is a bad 'cordon sanitaire.'. Above all, don't despond about it. Let not anxiety have 'thee on the hip.' Consider your health as your greatest and best friend, and think as well of it, in spite of all its foibles, as you can. For instance, never dream, though you may have a 'clever hack,' of galloping consumption, or indulge in the Meltonian belief that you are going the pace. Despondency, in a nice case, is the overweight that you may kick the beam and the

bucket, both at once. Besides, the best fence against care is -ha! ha! wherefore, care to have one all around you when ever you can. Let your lungs crow like the chanticleer,' and as like the game-cock as possible. It expands the chest, enlarges the heart, quickens the circulation, and, like a trumpet, makes the 'spirit dance.'

There is a world of good advice in this passage from a letter of Charles Lamb to Bernard Barton: "You are too much apprehensive about your complaint. The best way, in these cases, is to keep yourself as ignorant as you can—as ignorant as the world was before Galen-of the entire inner construction of the animal man: not to be conscious of a midriff; to hold kidneys (save of sheep and swine) to be an agreeable fiction; not to know whereabout the gall grows; to account the circulation of the blood a mere idle whim of Harvey's; to acknowledge no mechanism not visible. For, once fix the seat of your disorder, and your fancies flux into it like so many bad humors. Those medical gentry choose each his favorite part; one takes the lungs, another the liver, and refers to that whatever in the animal economy is amiss." He goes on to counsel his friend, "above all, to use exercise-keep a good conscience; avoid tamperings with hard terms of art, 'viscosity,' 'scirrhosity,' and those bugbears by which simple patients are scared into their graves. Believe the general sense of the mercantile world, which holds that desks are not deadly. mind, and not the limbs, that taints by long sitting. the patience of tailors; think how long the Lord sits ; think of the brooding hen."

It is the Think of Chancellor

Thus much about the mission of medicine, and its purveyors, as well as some of the disasters it proposes to remedy: now a word or two about the subject of all this-man. Physiologists assert that this "paragon of animals" is physically a machine -a steam-engine-his brain the engine, his lungs the boiler, bis viscera the furnace. That he glides along the track of life, often at the fearful speed of sixty or seventy pulsations in a

minute, never stopping, so long as the machine is in working order. He has also been compared to a steamship, a chemical laboratory, a distillery, a forcing-pump, a grist-mill, a furnace, an electric telegraph.

Man has the power of imitating almost every motion but that of flight. To effect these he has, in maturity and health, 60 bones in his head, 60 in his thighs and legs, 62 in his arms and hands, and 67 in the trunk. He has also 434 muscles. His heart makes 64 pulsations in a minute. There are also three complete circulations of the blood, in the short space of an hour.

Old Francis Quarles furnishes the moral estimate:

"Why, what is man? a quickened lump of earth,

A feast for worms, a bubble full of breath,
A looking-glass for grief, a flash, a minute,
A painted tomb with putrefaction in it,
A map of death, a burden of a song,
A winter's dust, a worm of five feet long.
Begot in sin, in darkness nourished, born
In sorrow; naked, shiftless, and forlorn.
His first voice heard, is crying for relief,
Alas! he comes into a world of grief;
His age is sinful, and his youth is vain,
His life's a punishment, his death's a pain.
His life's an hour of joy, a world of sorrow,
His death's a winter night that finds no morrow.
Man's life's an hour-glass, which being run,
Concludes that hour of joy, and so is done."

In closing our desultory observations on the fallacies of the faculty," we refer to the testimony of sundry members of the profession, for determining the amount of good or evil of which they are the occasion.

Dr. Akenside, himself a physician, has said, "Physicians, in despair of making medicine a science, have agreed to convert it into a trade." Sir Anthony Carlisle said, "that medicine was an art founded in conjecture and improved by murder;

that he never could discover any rational principle in a physician's treatment of a case, and that, therefore, it was all guesswork." The late Professor Gregory used often to declare, in his class-room, "that ninety-nine out of one hundred medical facts were so many medical lies; and that medical doctrines were, for the most part, little better than stark, staring nonsense."

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Assuredly the uncertain and most unsatisfactory art that we call medical science, is no science at all, but a jumble of inconsistent opinions, of conclusions hastily and often incorrectly drawn, of facts misunderstood or perverted, of comparisons without analogy, of hypotheses without reason, and of theories not only useless but dangerous."* The late Dr. Hooper remarks in his writings, "Medicine is now defined the art of preventing and treating diseases, but formerly it was called the art of preserving health and curing diseases. The word cure is not used at present, because we possess no remedy capable of effecting an immediate cure. There is a great difference between treatment and cure, as many diseases are incurable, but are still proper subjects for treatment." It has often been objected to the physician or practitioner that he is unable satisfactorily to explain the performance of a single function, the phenomena of a single disease, or the operation of a single remedy. However humiliating the admission of such a truth may be, it cannot wholly be denied. But fully to account for the performance of one function would be nearly paramount to the explanation of all, for all are governed by the same. general laws, and subject to the same general causes. Dr. James Johnson, of London, has left upon record the following extraordinary admission: "I declare as my conscientious opinion, founded on long experience and reflection, that if there was not a single physician, surgeon, apothecary, chemist. druggist, nor drug on the face of the earth, there would be less sickness and less mortality than now prevail." We are

*Dublin Medical Journal.