_3d Exception._—The visitors, and those in general holding communication with the sick, are also liable to be affected more with disease than others who remain free of it, on account of the sorrow usually felt on all occasions of public calamities, and particularly of very mortal pestilence, and more especially experienced in all its acuteness, in the silent sick-room of a friend. Among the scenes our professional duties call us to witness, there is, perhaps, none so touching as the sorrow-striken countenances of friends, directed to the sick, nay, perhaps the deathbed of one they love; and we have noted the unspeakable sorrow then felt, the deep anguish then experienced, and the silence more touching than eloquence that reigns throughout the sick-room, as an awful contemplation, truly indicative of a depression that is calculated to throw its sufferers into the same situation which they so much deplore in others. That sorrow attendant on such calamities, and that was so well marked, when cholera lately assailed the nations of the earth, throws into the shade almost every other form, sinks deep into the soul, and enervates every principle of life. It gives a pall to every taste, a disregard to all enjoyment, deprives the unhappy victim of that serenity and composure so favourable to health, and, on the contrary, imparts a restlessness to body and mind, until at length his system becomes a very nidus of disease. None who have attentively watched the course of widely-spread disease, can doubt that that sorrow, so generally experienced on those occasions, is an active instrument, and a strong abettor of the original epidemic influences. It must be obvious to them, that those strong and deeply-felt emotions, with which man contemplates his relatives, his neighbours, aye, his very race, falling around him,—feeling, too, that he is in the midst of danger, and can do nothing for his security,—must produce a withering influence on the most vital functions of the body, and prove the immediate cause of disease. Under such circumstances, when disease manifests itself, it certainly cannot be wise to disregard the part they must enact in the production of the effect observed, and to attribute the whole, or nearly the whole, to the operation of atmospheric contagion, which has already been shewn to be without sufficient evidence of its existence, in any one case, or in any one disease. The visitors, also, are exposed to the action of an atmosphere, which, as it is sometimes impure, is liable to be hurtful.