Broussais, on the contrary, contends that the primary and essential seat of inflammation in fever is the mucous membrane of the stomach, or of the intestines, or both, but especially the former, and that, therefore, the proper designation of it is _gastro-enteritis_. While it had long been conceived that inflammation of the digestive organs is the cause of certain symptomatic fevers, Broussais maintains that the most important discovery (most important because so intimately connected with the treatment of the disease) that this affection is the cause of all fevers, idiopathic as well as symptomatic, and that there are in fact no essential fevers, is peculiarly and exclusively his own. Thus, according to this theorist, all the fevers of authors are connected with gastro-enteritis, simple or complicated. “The simultaneous or successive inflammation of the stomach and small intestines, designated by this term,” says M. Rayer, “is of all the phlegmasiæ the most frequent, and at the same time that which has been oftenest overlooked or mistaken. It is not designated in any nosological table. Not long ago gastritis itself was generally looked upon as a very rare disease: of twenty-eight thousand two hundred and ninety-nine sick admitted into the civil hospitals of Paris in 1807, six only were designated in the returns as labouring under inflammation of the stomach, whilst six thousand one hundred and forty-three were treated for continued or remittent fevers.” The prevailing doctrines relative to the nature and seat of fever at present then are two, the direct reverse of each other; one, that it is a general disease affecting the entire system; that this affection of the system consists of debility which is manifested first in a loss of energy of the brain, but which rapidly extends to every organ and every function, and that consequently _the absence of any primary local disease_, ought still to form, as it has so long formed, an essential part of the definition: the other, that it is in the strictest sense a local disease; that its primary seat is invariably fixed in some one organ; that the affection itself consists of inflammation; and that that inflammation is seated, according to one opinion in the brain; according to the other in the stomach.