LIV. As I observed before, I am neither a partizan of the Helmonists, nor a favourer of the Galenists; but I look upon it as a thing certain, that an intemperate use of purging and bleeding, has destroyed many men, and especially, if administered when nature is much weakened; notwithstanding which, I am persuaded that they are serviceable in many cases. Whether they are absolutely necessary, and whether patients could not do well, if other remedies were substituted in their places, is a point I will not take upon me to determine; and especially, when I have fresh in my memory, the declaration of a physician, whose authority has great weight with me. This is Lucas Tozzi, a famous Italian physician, who in his exposition of the third aphorism of the first book of Hippocrates, _Habitus Athletarum, &c._ after combating and controverting the usefulness of bleeding, with seemingly very efficacious and persuasive reasoning, he asserts, and offers to prove, that it is not necessary in any one of the diseases, in which the Galenists insist it cannot be dispensed with; and in answer to the experience they alledge of its utility, he quotes his own; and says, _if they appeal to experience, and insist that it is evident from thence, that many people have been cured of various disorders by blood-letting; I reply, that in the hospital of the Anunciada at Naples, where I have officiated as physician many years, I have cured in a short space of time, and without taking from them one drop of blood, hundreds and thousands of patients, who have been attacked with some one or other of the following disorders, frensies, pleurisies, quinsies, inflammations of the liver, spitting of blood, erysipelases, and all kinds of fevers_. LV. What shall we say to this? Lucas Tozzi was not only a great theorist, but also a most expert, successful, and much esteemed practitioner, and as such, his advice was solicited with anxiety by people of the first rank. If he without bleeding cured all those disorders, which in the common opinion stand most in need of that evacuation, and not only cured them, but did it in a short time, what diseases must they be which cannot be cured without blood-letting?