perseded by others. It can hardly be doubted that
they will come into vogue again, more or less extensively, under the
influence of that irresistible demand for change just referred to.

Then will come the usual talk about a change in the character
of disease, which has about as much meaning as that concerning
"old-fashioned snow-storms." "Epidemic constitutions" of disease mean
something, no doubt; a great deal as applied to malarious affections;
but that the whole type of diseases undergoes such changes that the
practice must be reversed from depleting to stimulating, and vice versa,
is much less likely than that methods of treatment go out of fashion and
come in again. If there is any disease which claims its percentage with
reasonable uniformity, it is phthisis. Yet I remember that the reverend
and venerable Dr. Prince of Salem told me one Commencement day, as I was
jogging along towards Cambridge with him, that he recollected the time
when that disease was hardly hardly known; and in confirmation of his
statement mentioned a case in which it was told as a great event, that
somebody down on "the Cape" had died of "a consumption." This story does
not sound probable to myself, as I repeat it, yet I assure you it is
true, and it shows how cautiously we must receive all popular stories of
great changes in the habits of disease.

Is there no progress, then, but do we return to the same beliefs and
practices which our forefathers wore out and threw away? I trust and
believe that there is a real progress. We may, for instance, return in
a measure to the Brunonian stimulating system, but it must be in a
modified way, for we cannot go back to the simple Brunonian pathology,
since we have learned too much of diseased action to accept its
convenient dualism. So of other doctrines, each new Avatar strips them
of some of their old pretensions, until they take their fitting place
at last, if they have any truth in them, or disappear, if they were mere
phantasms of the imagination.

In the mean time, while medical theories are coming in and going out,
there is a set of sensible men who are never run away with by them, but
practise their art sagaciously and faithfully in much the same way from
generation to generation. From the time of Hippocrates to that of our
own medical patriarch, there has been an apostolic succession of wise
and good practitioners. If you will look at the first aphorism of the
ancient Master you will see th