"The use of the Lancet," says Dr. Dickson, "was the invention of an unenlightened, possibly a sanguinary age; and its continued use says but little for the after-discoveries of ages, or for the boasted progress of medical science. "Will the men who thus lovingly pour out the blood, dispute its importance in the animal economy? Will they deny that it forms the basis of the solids,--that when the body has been wasted by long diseases, it is by the blood only it can recover its healthy volume and appearance? "Misguided by theory, man, presumptuous man, has dared to divide what God, as a part of creation, has united; to open what the Eternal, in the wisdom of his omniscience made entire. "It is on the face of it a most unnatural proceeding. How can you withdraw blood from one organ without depriving every other of the material of its healthy state? "The first resource of the surgeon is the lancet. The first thing he thinks of, when called to an accident, is how he can most quickly open the flood-gates of the heart, to pour out the stream of an already enfeebled existence." Capt. Owen, in detailing the mortality which took place among his people on the coast of Africa, by yellow fever, says, "he had not one instance of perfect recovery after a liberal application of the lancet.["] And in the subsequent report of the Select Committee on the Western Coast of Africa, there occurs the following passage. "The bleeding system has fortunately gone out of fashion; and the frightful mortality that attended its practice, is now no longer known on board our ships." "Let the reader," says Dr. Gibbs, in his letters from Gräfenberg, "enter the crowded hospitals in England or the Continent, and see how mercilessly the lancet, the leech, and cupping-glass are employed in the diseases of the poor. Look at the pale and ghastly faces of the inmates." Among the numerous diseases which bleeding can produce, Darwin says, a paroxysm of gout is liable to recur. John Hunter mentions lock-jaw and dropsy; Travers, blindness and palsy; Marshall Hall, mania; Blundell, dysentery; Broussais, fever and convulsion. "When an animal loses a considerable quantity of blood," says John Hunter, "the heart increases in frequency of strokes, as also in its violence." Yet these are the indications for which professors bleed. Magendie mentions _pneumonia_ as having been produced by it; and further tells us, that he has witnessed among its effects "the entire train of inflammatory phenomena;" and mark, he adds the extraordinary fact, "that this inflammation will have been produced by the very agent chiefly used to combat it." We read in scripture, "He that sheddeth man's blood, by man shall his blood be shed." It has ever been supposed, that this applied to the assassin; but holy writ is deeper than this! and no doubt the time will come, when one man will no more think of bleeding another, than he would of committing any other act that should expose him to public ignominy.