The description of the danger, upon the abandoning one’s self to such vitious practices, is perhaps one of the most powerful motives of correcting one’s self of them: it is a dreadful picture, and fit to make one start back with horror and affright. Let us assemble in one point of view the principal features of it. A general wasting of the whole machine; an enfeeblement of all the corporal senses and of all the faculties of the soul; loss of imagination and memory; imbecillity; contempt; shame; the ignominy such viciousness drags after it; all the functions of life disturbed, suspended, or painfully executed; long, vexatious, unaccountable, disgustful diseases; acute and constantly regenerating pains; all the infirmities or evils of old age, in the age of youth and vigor; an unaptitude for all those occupations for which man is born; the vile character to act of being an useless burthen to the earth; the mortifications to which such a character is daily exposed; a distaste for all worthy pleasures; a dull melancholy; an aversion for society and consequently for one’s self; a horror of life, the dread of temptations every moment to suicide; an anguish worse than pain; a remorse worse than anguish, a remorse which daily increasing, and which doubtless taking a new force, when the soul is no longer weakened by its ties to the body, will perhaps serve for a torment to all eternity, for an unextinguishable fire. See here the sketch of the fate reserved for those who proceed as if they had not it to dread! Before I quit this article of the method of cure, I ought to observe to the patients, and it is an observation equally extensible to all who labor under chronical disorders, especially when they are accompanied with weakness; that they ought not to hope that, in a few days, those evils can be repaired or removed, which are the produce of the errors of years. They must lay their account with being obliged to endure the tediousness of a long cure, and to confine themselves scrupulously to all the rules laid down for their regimen. If sometimes they appear trifling or minute to them, it is because they themselves are not fit judges of the degree of their importance; it would be better for them constantly to repeat to themselves, that the irksome tediousness of the most rigid method of cure is still preferable to a state of any the slightest disease. Be it allowed me to observe, that for one disorder that remains uncured through improper treatment, there are a number, which the indocility of the patients renders incurable, notwithstanding the most well judged assistance given on the part of the physician.