[14] Many Persons, With a Design to preserve their Wines, add Shot to them, or Preparations of Lead, Alum, &c. The Government should forbid, under the most severe Penalties, all such Adulterations, as tend to introduce the most painful Cholics, Obstruction, and a long Train of Evils, which it sometimes proves difficult to trace to this peculiar Cause; while they shorten the lives of, or cruelly torment, such over credulous Purchasers, as lay in a Stock of bad Wines, or drink of them, without distinction, from every Wine Merchant or Tavern. _E. L._ _This Note, from the Editor at_ Lyons, _we have sufficient Reason for retaining here. K._ __Chapter II.__ _Of the Causes which aggravate the Diseases of the People. General Considerations._ __Sect.__ 14. The Causes already enumerated in the first Chapter occasion Diseases; and the bad Regimen, or Conduct of the People, on the Invasion of them, render them still more perplexing, and very often mortal. There is a prevailing Prejudice among them, which is every Year attended with the Death of some Hundreds in this Country, and it is this--That all Distempers are cured by Sweat; and that to procure Sweat, they must take Abundance of hot and heating things, and keep themselves very hot. This is a Mistake in both Respects, very fatal to the Population of the State; and it cannot be too much inculcated into Country People; that by thus endeavouring to force Sweating, at the very Beginning of a Disease, they are with great Probability, taking Pains to kill themselves. I have seen some Cases, in which the continual Care to provoke this Sweating, has as manifestly killed the Patient, as if a Ball had been shot through his Brains; as such a precipitate and untimely Discharge carries off the thinner Part of the Blood, leaving the Mass more dry, more viscid and inflamed. Now as in all acute Diseases (if we except a very few, and those too much less frequent) the Blood is already too thick; such a Discharge must evidently increase the Disorder, by co-operating with its Cause. Instead of forcing out the watery, the thinner Part of the Blood, we should rather endeavour to increase it. There is not a single Peasant perhaps, who does not say, when he has a Pleurisy, or an Inflammation of his Breast, that his Blood is too thick, and that it cannot circulate. On seeing it in the Bason after Bleeding, he finds it _black, dry, burnt_; these are his very Words. How strange is it then, that common Sense should not assure him, that, far from forcing out the _Serum_, the watery Part, of such a Blood by sweating, there is a Necessity to increase it?