And this is precisely the fact, as is demonstrated by the condition of the organs, in those ordinary types of fever, the essence of which has been supposed to consist in debility, and which have recently assumed the dignified name of adynamic. That men who are capable of looking only at the most obvious appearances of things, who, satisfied with what they find at the surface, give themselves no concern to discover its source, should continue to mistake the effect for the cause, and to consider as in its own primary and essential nature, that to be debility which is the last result of long-continued and most destructive energy of action, is highly probable; but, on that very account, the fallacy is the more deeply to be deplored; because to these men must sometimes be committed the care of human beings who will fall certain victims to the error. It is easy to disregard the voice of reason when opposed to specious, however fallacious appearances; but it is difficult to withstand the evidence of sense. In justification of the strength of the language I use, I therefore appeal to the pathology I adduce. The notion of debility in the intense forms of fever I look upon to be an error no less palpable in its nature than destructive in its consequences; and if the havoc it produces do not confer upon it a pre-eminence as bad as that of the very disease of which it is supposed to constitute the essence, it at least entitles it, in comparison with every other error in medicine, to the distinction recognized in society, between the hero and the murderer: the one destroys a single human being now and then; but the other numbers its victims by thousands. It may be difficult to eradicate this mischievous opinion where it was first engendered, and where it still continues to be fostered, in the study of the falsely reasoning theorist; but it is easy to confute it at the table of the pathological anatomist; and it must ultimately fall, if not by the pen, by the scalpel. CHAPTER V. _Of Scarlatina. Characters by which it is distinguished from Continued Fever, without an Eruption. Division into Scarlatina Synochodes and Typhodes. Events which occasionally occur in Fever, but which form no essential Part of it._ The only kind of continued fever attended with an eruption, which it falls within the compass of the present work to notice, is that of scarlatina, and, even in relation to this, after the full account which has been given of the other forms of fever, it will be necessary to state only the peculiarities by which it is distinguished.