if we do not arrest the progress of the disease, at least we do not add to its strength by the adoption of violent and desperate expedients, because we feel called upon to do something, yet know not what to attempt; we do not destroy, if we cannot save. The physician, enlightened by the pathology of the disease, who prescribes for a patient in fever, is like a skilful surgeon, who is guided in the performance of a difficult and delicate operation by a knowledge of anatomy so intimate, that every touch of his scalpel exposes a tissue with which he is acquainted, and discloses the site of a vessel with which he is familiar; the object aimed at by the operation may not be obtained, but, at least, the cause of its failure is not that the operator wounds a structure which he ought to have avoided, or opens an artery, of the situation and distribution of which he is ignorant. On the contrary, the physician who prescribes for a patient in fever, without knowing the pathology of the disease, is like a Charlatan, who plunges his instrument boldly into the chest or the abdomen, without knowing where it goes or caring what it wounds; it may possibly open a tumour and let out the disease, but it is more likely to pierce some vital organ and to let out life. CHAPTER VII. _Of the Relation between the Phenomena of Fever; or the Theory of the Disease._ In the preceding chapters it has been shown what are the real events which take place in fever, the assemblage of which constitutes the disease: it has also been shown in what order these events succeed each other, and upon what conditions of what organs they depend. To assign further the true relation between these events, is to establish the theory of fever in the only philosophical sense of the term theory: and that relation must already have suggested itself to the mind of the attentive reader. We have seen that the first indications of disease are clearly traceable to the nervous system: that the disorder of the functions of the brain and spinal cord with which the attack always commences, demonstrates that these organs form the primary seats of the malady: that the derangement in the functions of these organs is truly _invariable_, and is invariably the first morbid condition that is observed to take place: that there never was a case of fever, from the slightest to the most severe, in which these organs were not in a greater or less degree in a disordered state, and in which that disordered state did not precede every other. This affection of the nervous system then, the invariable antecedent of all that follows, is the primary essential event in the morbid series which constitutes fever.