But at no period were Spaniards careful even of their own lives, and much less of those of others, being a people of untender bowels. Familiarity with pain blunts much of the finer feelings of persons employed even in our hospitals, for those who live by the dead have only an undertaker’s sympathy for the living, and are as dull to the poetry of innocent health, as Mr. Giblet is to a sportive house-fed lamb. Matters are not improved in Spain, where the wounds, blood, and slaughterings of the pastime bull-fight, the _mueran_ or death mob-cries, and _pasele por las armas_, the shoot him on the spot, the Draco and Durango decrees, and practices of all in power, educate all sexes to indifference to blood; thus the fatal knife-stab or surgeon’s cut are viewed as _cosas de España_ and things of course. The philosophy of the general indifference to life in Spain, which almost amounts to Oriental fatalism, in the number of executions and general resignation to bloodshed, arises partly from life among the many being at best but a struggle for existence; thus in setting it in the cast, the player only stakes coppers, and when one is removed, there is somewhat less difficulty for survivors; hence every one is for himself and for to-day; après moi le déluge, _el ultimo mono se ahoga_, the last monkey is drowned, or as we say, the devil takes the hindmost. [Sidenote: MEDICAL ABUSES.] The neglect of well-supported, well-regulated hospitals, has recoiled on the Spaniards. The rising profession are deprived of the advantages of _walking_ them, and thus beholding every nice difficulty solved by experienced masters. Recently some efforts have been made in large towns, especially on the coasts, to introduce reforms and foreign ameliorations; but official jobbing and ignorant routine are still among the diseases that are _not_ cured in Spain. In 1811, when the English army was at Cadiz, a physician, named Villarino, urged by some of our indignant surgeons, brought the disgraceful condition of Spanish hospitals before the Cortes. A commission was appointed, and their sad report, still extant, details how the funds, food, wine, &c., destined for the patients were consumed by the managers and their subalterns. The results were such as might be expected; the authorities held together, and persecuted Villarino as a _revolucionario_, or reformer, and succeeded in disgracing him. The superintendent of this establishment was the notorious Lozano de Torres, who starved the English army after Talavera, and was “a thief and a liar,” in the words of the Duke. The Regency, after this very exposure of his hospital, promoted him to the civil government of Old Castile; and Ferdinand VII., in 1817, made him Minister of Justice.