We can now then answer the questions so often asked—are fever and inflammation the same? and if not the same in what do they differ? Fever and inflammation are not the same, because the term fever is appropriated to the designation of a certain number of events which occur in a certain series: the term inflammation, on the other hand, expresses another series of events, each event composing this train, succeeding each other in a different order: and the difference between the two series of events is precisely this difference in their individual phenomena and in their order of succession. What the physical and the physiological condition of the organs is, as contrasted with their condition in the state of health, has not yet been made out with regard either to fever or to inflammation: in the present state of our knowledge, therefore, we can neither affirm nor deny any thing respecting either the identity or the difference of that physical and physiological condition of the organs in these two classes of disease. What inflammation is beyond the series of events we are able to observe we do not know: what fever is beyond the series of events we are able to observe we do not know: we compare the events and we see that they differ: and since the use of names is to mark and to express differences, it is right to distinguish these different events by different terms. But though in the present state of our knowledge we are not justified in considering fever and inflammation to be the same, yet the close, perhaps the constant connexion between them, is a fact of the utmost importance to be known, and requires to be incessantly before the view of the practitioner. And of this we shall have but too abundant evidence in the sequel.