The treatment of fever seemed at that time to be the chief point; to be that part of medicine which had a real scientific foundation, and in which the local treatment fell comparatively into the background. The therapeutics of febrile diseases had thereby become very monotonous, although the means indicated by theory were still abundantly used, and especially blood-letting, which since that time has almost been entirely abandoned. Therapeutics became still more impoverished as the younger and more critical generation grew up, and tested the assumptions of that which was considered to be scientific. Among the younger generation were many who, in despair as to their science, had almost entirely given up therapeutics, or on principle had grasped at an empiricism such as Rademacher then taught, which regarded any expectation of a scientific explanation as a vain hope. What we learned at that time were only the ruins of the older dogmatism, but their doubtful features soon manifested themselves. The vitalistic physician considered that the essential part of the vital processes did not depend upon natural forces, which, doing their work with blind necessity and according to a fixed law, determined the result. What these forces could do appeared quite subordinate, and scarcely worthy of a minute study. He thought that he had to deal with a soul-like being, to which a thinker, a philosopher, and an intelligent man must be opposed. May I elucidate this by a few outlines? At this time auscultation and percussion of the organs of the chest were being regularly practised in the clinical wards. But I have often heard it maintained that they were a coarse mechanical means of investigation which a physician with a clear mental vision did not need; and it indeed lowered and debased the patient, who was anyhow a human being, by treating him as a machine. To feel the pulse seemed the most direct method of learning the mode of action of the vital force, and it was practised, therefore, as by far the most important means of investigation. To count with a repeater was quite usual, but seemed to the old gentlemen as a method not quite in good taste. There was, as yet, no idea of measuring temperature in cases of disease. In reference to the ophthalmoscope, a celebrated surgical colleague said to me that he would never use the instrument, it was too dangerous to admit crude light into diseased eyes; another said the mirror might be useful for physicians with bad eyes, his, however, were good, and he did not need it.