first symptoms is rarely done) it will be found to be strictly a _topical_ affection, the general disorder of the system being merely _secondary_, or symptomatic of this.”[12] In another work it is further stated, that all the varieties of idiopathic fever, which differ but in degree, as well as those which arise from specific contagion, as malignant sore throat, scarlet fever, small-pox, and so on, arise from one and the same affection of one and the same organ, and that that affection consists essentially in inflammation. A similar doctrine has for some time been taught in France by a man whose disciples have already spread over every country in Europe, and are fast diffusing themselves over the new world, and whose devotion to their master and his system, reminds us of days long past, when the attachment of the pupil to the sage was as reverential and as enthusiastic as that ever paid by true knight to lady-fair in the brightest days of chivalry. “Penetrated by the sublime views of Bichat as to the sympathies,” say M. M. Coutançeau et Rayer, two of the most ardent disciples of this school;[13] “rich in numerous facts observed with a rare sagacity, M. Broussais came to overturn, from the very foundation, the antique edifice of fevers. In his works as well as in his lectures, he has applied himself, for many years, to demonstrate, that the fevers which had been called essential, were nothing more than local diseases, inflammations, nay even gastro-enterites.” These writers go on to state that, according to Broussais, all fevers are of the same nature, those termed malignant differing from other fevers only by the violence and danger of their congestions; that all the causes of fever act locally; that, considered in a general and abstract manner, fever is invariably the result of a _primitive or sympathetic irritation of the heart_ through the effect of which its contractions are quickened, and that every irritation sufficiently intense to produce fever is an inflammation.[14]