This view of the constitution of fever appears to explain in the most luminous and complete manner every peculiarity of the febrile state: to reconcile all its apparent anomalies, with which few who have studied the subject have not been perplexed: to establish the true distinction between fever and inflammation; and to show why the phenomena exhibited by these two affections are so essentially different, and why therefore each requires a different mode of treatment. In this point of view no theory was ever more eminently practical, or led to a more guarded practice. Inflammation does not lose its nature by being combined with that peculiar affection of the nervous system which converts it into fever; it only modifies its state: the remedies proper for fever do not differ from those which are effectual in inflammation; they only require to be modified in accordance with the modified nature of the disease. He who believes fever to consist of an affection of the nervous system alone, every other affection that may be combined with it being accidental, will rarely think of using the lancet: he who believes fever to consist of inflammation alone, and overlooks the presence of the nervous affection, will be apt to carry the employment of the lancet too far: he alone who embraces the view of both, brings within his own all the phenomena: he alone adopts a sound theory of the disease, and we now see that he alone is likely to be led to a sound practice. When the theory of a disease collects, arranges and points out the true relation between all its phenomena, there is good reason to conclude that that theory is sound; but when it moreover directly leads to that treatment of the malady which experience shows to be the most safe and the most effectual, its truth is established by every test that can be applied to it.