There are some diseases against which the success of remedies is next to sure. Those which are the consequences of venereal exhaustion, and, _a fortiori_, of self-pollution, do not enter into this class; and the prognostic which is to be made of them, when they shall have arrived at a certain degree, has nothing in it but what is desperately terrible. HIPPOCRATES has, in such case, denounced DEATH. “_It is a deplorable disorder_, says BOERHAAVE; _I have often seen it, but could never cure it._”[92] M. VAN SWIETEN had, for three years, a patient whom he mentions for it, under his hands, without success. I have seen some perish miserably of this disorder. There were even others of those patients, to whom I could not so much as give relief. Yet these examples should not intirely discourage: there are not wanting instances of a happier issue. Some may be found in the collection of the _Onania_, and in the Observations of Physicians; my own practice has furnished me some. In the same place where HIPPOCRATES gives a description of this disease, he points out means of cure. “When, (says he,) the patient is in this condition, let there be fomentations made for him, over his whole body; then give him a medicine that may provoke a puke; after that, another to purge his head, and then a cathartic by stool. After the purgatives, give whey or asses milk; after that, cows milk for forty days. While he drinks milk, he must abstain from flesh meats, and in the evening he may have some boiled wheat. After his milk diet is over, he should be nourished with the most tender meats, beginning with a small quantity, and by this means he will recover afresh. For a whole twelvemonth he must avoid all kind of debauchery, all venereal indulgence, and all immoderate exercise; he must confine himself to walks, in which he will do well to avoid the cold, or the sun.” It is remarkable here, that HIPPOCRATES begins the method of cure by an emetic, and by purging. Now there is a danger of such an authority’s obtaining the force of a law, and yet the observation of this law would, in a number of cases, be pernicious. But it is easy to get rid of this perplexity, by observing, that he only ordered purgatives in a view to divert the fluxion which he supposed threw itself from the head on the spine of the back; and that, in another place, he puts those who are sick, after venereal excesses, in the catalogue of those to whom no purgatives should be given, “_because not only they can do no good, but, on the contrary, they may do a great deal of harm_[93].” So that it is this last rule which must be considered as the general one: the first constitutes an exception, and an exception which appears founded on a theory, of which the error is now discovered, and which especially therefore ought to have no force.