Perhaps the first reason why the lancet is less used than formerly is found in the fact, or rather in the belief, of the change indicated. It is largely accepted as true by the older men in the profession that patients do not bear blood-letting as well as three generations ago. Accepting this as correct, it rationally follows that we should bleed less. But this is only one of the factors in the account, and not the largest one. The opinion that the physicians of the early part of this century used the lancet too often is beyond doubt correct. The doctrine of the purely symptomatic nature of fever put prominently forward by Brousais, and earnestly championed by active and pushing minds a century ago, and which was generally received in Europe and in this country, gave such an unfortunate impetus to the use of the lancet as finally led to its abuse. Patients were bled for almost every thing; not only for the fevers of acknowledged inflammatory type, such as acute pleurisy and the like, were bled for, but also cases of typhus, typhoid, etc., upon the ground that the fever in the case was only a symptom of the inflammatory action and was to be subdued or lessened by antiphlogistic remedies, chief of which was the abstraction of blood. The theory of the essentiality of fever became lost sight of, and the doctor treated for an inflammation rather than for a fever. Without giving up the theory in which they had been educated, some physicians began to see that in some epidemics of disease a larger percentage of cases were lost among those where venesection had been used than among those similarly sick who were not bled. The deduction from this was that it would be better to bleed less. But a change was not to be made without a struggle. Reference to the medical literature of the first half of the century shows that there was a deal of warm discussion between the blood-letters and the anti-blood-letters. Out of the observations and discussions made there was cultivated a prejudice, professional to a moderate extent but popular to a large one, against bleeding _per se_, and without reference to the character of the disease under treatment or to the differing conditions that might exist, which helped to carry the usage from its former abuse at times to the opposite extreme of general abandonment. It is a universal law in nature that the farther the pendulum swings in one direction, the farther will it swing in the opposite on its return. The pendulum of venesection had swung too far forward for the best in the treatment of disease, and the return carried it quite beyond the best in the backward reaction.