The Indians are said to be successful in predicting the events of diseases. While diseases are simple, the marks which distinguish them, or characterize their several stages, are generally uniform and obvious to the most indifferent observer. These marks afford so much certainty, that the Indians sometimes kill their physicians for a false prognosis, charging the death of the patient to their carelessness, or ignorance. They estimate the danger of their patients by the degrees of appetite; while an Indian is able to eat, he is looked upon as free from danger. But when we consider the number and variety in the signs of diseases, among civilized nations, together with the shortness of life, the fallacy of memory, and the uncertainty of observation, where shall we find a physician willing to risk his reputation, much less his life, upon the prediction of the event of our acute diseases? We can derive no advantage from the simple sign, by which the Indians estimate the danger of their patients; for we daily see a want of appetite for food in diseases which are attended with no danger; and we sometimes observe an unusual degree of this appetite to precede the agonies of death. I honour the name of HIPPOCRATES: but forgive me, ye votaries of antiquity, if I attempt to pluck a few grey hairs from his venerable head. I was once an idolater at his altar, nor did I turn apostate from his worship, till I was taught, that not a tenth part of his prognostics corresponded with modern experience, or observation. The pulse[14], urine, and sweats, from which the principal signs of life and death have been taken, are so variable, in most of the acute diseases of civilized nations, that the wisest physicians have in some measure excluded the prognosis from being a part of their profession. [14] Doctor Cullen used to inform his pupils, that after forty years' experience, he could find no relation between his own observations on the pulse, and those made by Doctor Solano. The climate and customs of the people in Spain being so different from the climate and customs of the present inhabitants of Britain, may account for the diversity of their observations. Doctor Heberden's remarks upon the pulse, in the second volume of the Medical Transactions, are calculated to show how little the issue of diseases can be learned from it.