oper to human minds and hearts."

He mentions that it has happened to him, in his visits to the poor, as
Physician to the Eastern Dispensary, to be unable to stay in the room,
even to write the prescription.

"What must it be," he adds, "to live in such an atmosphere, and to go
through the process of disease in it?"

In another place he says,

"You cannot in fact cure. As long as the poor remain in the
situations which produce their disease, the proper remedies for such
disease cannot be applied to them."

This state of things, too, according to the same authority, is advancing
on us:

"Whatever may be the cause, the fact is certain, that at the present
time an epidemic is prevailing, which lays prostrate the powers of
life more rapidly and completely than any other epidemic that has
appeared for a long series of years."

The experienced student of history, reading of long wars, looks for their
consummation in the coming pestilence. Gathering itself up, now from the
ravaged territory, now from the beleaguered town, now from the carnage of
the battle field, this awful form arises at last in its full strength,
and rushing over the world, leaves far behind man's puny efforts at
extermination. We have a domestic pestilence, it seems, dwelling with
us; and if we look into the causes of that, shall we find less to blame,
or less to mourn over, than in the insane wars which are the more
acknowledged heralds of this swift destruction? But, to return to
detail. Mr. Toynbee, one of the surgeons of the St. George's and the St.
James's Dispensary, tells us:

"In the class of patients to our dispensary, nearly all the families
have but a single room each, and a very great number have only one
bed to each family. The state of things in respect to morals, as
well as health, I sometimes find to be terrible. I am now attending
one family, where the father, about 50, the mother about the same
age, a grown up son about 20, in a consumption, and a daughter about
17, who has scrofulous affection of the jaw and throat, for which I
am attending her, and a child, all sleep in the same bed in a room
where the father and three or four other men work during the day as
tailors, and they frequently work there late at night with candles.
I am also treating, at this present time, a woman with paralysis of
the lower extremities, the wife of the assistan