Whatever may be thought of the superior power of the theory of Brown, the pupil and rival of Cullen, to explain the general phenomena of the living body, whether in a state of health or of disease, the doctrine of the pupil relative to fever, differs in no essential respect from that of the master. Like his predecessor, Brown attributes all fevers to debility; and affirms that the distinctions which physicians have made about the differences of fever are without foundation; that they are all the same, differing only in degree; that the debility during the cold stage is the greatest; that of the hot less; that of the sweating stage which ends in health for the time, is the least of all: hence in a mild degree of the disease, as cold is the most hurtful power, its effect is gradually taken off by the agreeable heat of the bed or of the sun, and the strength thereby gradually drawn forth; that the heart and arteries gradually excited by the heat acquire vigour, and at last having their perspiratory terminations excited by the same stimulus, the most hurtful symptom is thereby removed, the hot fit produced, and afterwards the same process carried on to the breaking out of sweat; that the cause of all these diseases, from the simplest and mildest intermittent to the gaol fever and the plague is the same with that of diseases not febrile, to wit debility; differing only in this, that it is the greatest debility compatible with life, and not long compatible with it. This very year, from Dublin, from the largest hospital for the reception of fever in the British Empire, precisely the same doctrine has been put forth. “Common epidemic fever,” says Dr. Stoker,[4] “especially when contagious, as I have frequently asserted when speaking of its pathology and treatment, has not appeared to me at any time to be essentially inflammatory. Adynamic fever, a denomination for typhus fever, which I shall employ, as I have hitherto done to express the putrid or malignant fever of Sydenham; the slow nervous fever of Huxham; the nervous fever of common language; the synochus, typhus mitior, and gravior of Cullen; the gaol and hospital fever; the _fièvres essentielles_ of the French; the epidemic of the Irish writers; the contagious of Bateman; the typhus of Dr. Armstrong; and the proper idiopathic, or essential fever of Dr. Clutterbuck: whether it exists separately or independently; or is combined with any of the other forms of febrile disease, sporadic or symptomatic.”[5] “Typhoid or adynamic fever I consider to be generally symptomatic of morbid changes in the physical characters of the blood, and have, as on former occasions, stated what those morbid changes are—but I have arranged inflammation under the head of symptomatic fever, merely because it is more usually connected with some change in the structure of parts, discoverable after death: on the other hand, typhus fever is connected with morbid changes, that _primarily_ take