It is interesting to note that before he left Edinburgh he published his first medical work, a treatise on the use of the stethoscope, which was undoubtedly the means of bringing that instrument--and with it Laennec's fruitful system of physical diagnosis by means of auscultation--to the general notice of the English-speaking medical profession. Even after all that has been written on the subject, it remains a very valuable little book. It was dedicated to the famous Cullen, who had already published a series of cases which had been illustrated by the use of the stethoscope, and to whom Stokes probably owed the idea of the need for a formal little treatise on the subject. It is typical of the slow adoption of medical novelties even when they are of great importance that more than ten years afterward, old-time, though distinguished, physicians not infrequently made fun of Stokes for spending so much time in the study of cases with the stethoscope, since in their opinion it was little more than a toy. This was done in no bitter, carping spirit, but with the most friendly complacency and condescension. Stokes, however, intensely practical in his way, realized the value of the instrument, and as the result of his teaching it soon began to be more generally used; thus introducing into English-speaking medical circles that exact knowledge of diseases of the chest which can only be obtained by means of this little instrument and the methods of auscultation which are associated with it. Immediately after graduation, Stokes settled down in his native city to practise. In 1826, when Stokes was only twenty-two, Dublin was visited by one of those epidemics of typhus fever which were so common in the first half of the {189} nineteenth century, and which consisted evidently, at least to a great degree, of what we now call typhoid fever, but intermixed with many cases of the real, dread typhus. The mortality in such epidemics, as we have reason to know from statistics here in New York, was always over twenty-five per cent, and often reached far above fifty per cent. The manner of contagion was unknown, only it was very well understood that those much in contact with the patients were likely to contract the disease. Among the poorer classes in Dublin the fever raged with virulence, but young Stokes devoted himself to the care of patients to an extent that severely taxed his physical powers of endurance. He devoted himself especially to the poorer classes. He did not contract the fever during the height of the epidemic in 1826, but he did in 1827, when it recurred, but fortunately he suffered in the mild form.