It is agreeable in medical researches to be under the direction of principles. They render unnecessary, in many instances, the slow and expensive operations of experience, and thus multiply knowledge, by lessening labour. The science of navigation has rested upon this basis, since the discovery of the loadstone. A mariner who has navigated a ship to one distant port, is capable of conducting her to every port on the globe. In like manner, the physician who can cure one disease by a knowledge of its principles, may by the same means cure all the diseases of the human body, for their causes are the same. Judgment is required, only in accommodating the force of remedies to the force of each disease. The difference in diseases which arises from their seats, from age, sex, habit, season, and climate, may be known in a short time, and is within the compass of very moderate talents. IV. Were I to enumerate all the local symptoms of gout which occur without fever, and the remedies that are proper to relieve them, I should be led into a tedious digression. The reader must consult practical books for an account of them. I shall only mention the remedies for a few of them. The theory of the gout which has been delivered, will enable us to understand the reason why a disease which properly belongs to the whole system, should at any time be accompanied only with local morbid affection. The whole body is a unit, and hence morbid impressions which are resisted by sound parts are propagated to such as are weak, where they excite those morbid actions we call disease. The _head-ach_ is a distressing symptom of the gout. It yields to depleting or tonic remedies, according to the degree of morbid action which accompanies it. I have heard an instance of an old man, who was cured of an obstinate head-ach by throwing aside his nightcap, and sleeping with his bare head exposed to the night air. The disease in this case was probably attended with great morbid action. In this state of the vessels of the brain, cupping, cold applications to the head, purges, a temperate diet, and blisters behind the ears, are all proper remedies, and should be used together, or in succession, as the nature of the disease may require. Many persons have been cured of the same complaint by sleeping in woollen nightcaps. The morbid action in these cases is always of a feeble nature. With this remedy, tonics, particularly the bark and cold bath, will be proper. I have once known a chronic gouty pain in the head cured by an issue in the arm, after pounds of bark, and many other tonic remedies, had been taken to no purpose. The _ophthalmia_ from gout should be treated with the usual remedies for that disease when it arises from other causes, with the addition of such local applications to other and distant parts of the body, as may abstract the gouty action from the eyes.