"With too many practitioners, it is the practice to employ mercury freely in every case of abdominal dropsy, under the vague notion of there existing some mechanical obstruction in the liver or other viscus, as a cause of it; and under the equally vague notion, that mercury so employed will remove it. The practice, however, to speak of it in the mildest terms, is founded on erroneous views of the pathology of these diseases; and employed, therefore, as it is by some, on all the occasions in which they meet with them, must be frequently very injurious. For, independently of the injury to be inflicted by it, when given freely in some of the forms of liver disease, there is an effect produced by it on the urine, when given to a person in health, resembling that which arises from the specific excitement of dropsy. Under a salivation, the urine becomes charged with serum. Any condition of the system, therefore, approaching even to a state of salivation, must be injurious, by the tendency it must have to increase that morbid state of the body, which is nearest allied to the hydropic one. Hence the mercurial salivation has been numbered amongst the remote causes of dropsy; and the resemblance between the dropsical and mercurial excitement, thus established by the common resemblance of the urine in these states, goes far to prove this connexion; and it is not improbable, that the mercurial inflammation, when considerable, may survive its specific cause, and degenerate at length into the purely hydropic state. When, however, mercury is given in minute doses, so that these its specific morbid effects are not produced, it is capable of becoming highly useful, as we shall presently have occasion to notice."