of incubation, of which so much is made, we have
no right to decide beforehand whether it shall be long or short, in the
cases we are considering. A dissection wound may produce symptoms of
poisoning in six hours; the bite of a rabid animal may take as many
months.

After the student has read the case in Dr. Meigs's 136th paragraph, and
the following one, in which he exclaims against the idea of contagion,
because the patient, delivered on the 26th of December, was attacked in
twenty-four hours, and died on the third day, let him read what happened
at the "Black Assizes" of 1577 and 1750. In the first case, six hundred
persons sickened the same night of the exposure, and three hundred more
in three days. [Elliotson's Practice, p. 298.] Of those attacked in the
latter year, the exposure being on the 11th of May, Alderman Lambert
died on the 13th, Under-Sheriff Cox on the 14th, and many of note before
the 20th. But these are old stories. Let the student listen then to Dr.
Gerhard, whose reputation as a cautious observer he may be supposed to
know. "The nurse was shaving a man, who died in a few hours after his
entrance; he inhaled his breath, which had a nauseous taste, and in an
hour afterwards was taken with nausea, cephalalgia, and singing of the
ears. From that moment the attack began, and assumed a severe character.
The assistant was supporting another patient, who died soon afterwards;
he felt the pungent heat upon his skin, and was taken immediately with
the symptoms of typhus." [Am. Jour. Med. Sciences, Feb. 1837, p. 299.]
It is by notes of cases, rather than notes of admiration, that we must
be guided, when we study the Revised Statutes of Nature, as laid down
from the curule chairs of Medicine.

Let the student read Dr. Meigs's 140th paragraph soberly, and then
remember, that not only does he infer, suspect, and surmise, but he
actually asserts (page 154), "there was poison in the house," because
three out of five patients admitted into a ward had puerperal fever and
died. Have I not as much right to draw a positive inference from "Dr.
A.'s" seventy exclusive cases as he from the three cases in the ward of
the Dublin Hospital? All practical medicine, and all action in common
affairs, is founded on inferences. How does Dr. Meigs know that the
patients he bled in puerperal fever would not have all got well if he
had not bled them?

"You see a man discharge a gun at another; you see the flash, you hear
the repor