ch as great anger, keen grief, or
immoderate joy, often go to such an extent as to exhaust the
excitability, and bring on diseases of indirect debility. Hence both
epilepsy and apoplexy have been the consequences of violent passion.

On the contrary, when there is a deficiency of exciting passion, as
in melancholy, fear, despair, &c. which are only lower degrees or
diminutions of joy, assurance, and hope, in the same way that cold is
a diminution of heat, this produces a state of direct debility. The
immediate consequences observable are, loss of appetite, loathing of
food, sickness of the stomach, vomiting, pain of the stomach, colic,
and even low fevers.

The effect of impure air, or air containing too small a proportion of
oxygen, is likewise a very powerful cause of debility.

In short, when any or several of these causes, which have been
mentioned, act upon the body, asthenic diseases are the consequence.

Asthenic diseases, as has frequently been hinted, may be divided into
two classes, those of direct debility, and those of indirect
debility.

Among the diseases of direct debility may be enumerated dyspepsia,
hypochondriasis, hysteric complaints, epilepsy, bleeding of the nose,
spitting and other effusions of blood, cholera morbus, chorea,
rickets, scrofula, scurvy, diabetes, dropsy, worms, diarrhoea,
asthma, cramp, intermittent fevers.

Among those of indirect debility, or which are produced by over
stimulating, which exhausts the excitability, may be enumerated,
gout, apoplexy, palsy, jaundice, and chronic inflammation of the
liver, violent indigestion, confluent small pox, typhous fever, and
probably the plague, dysentery, putrid sore throat, tetanus.

Diseases, therefore, according to this system, may be divided into
two classes. First, general diseases, which commence with an
affection of the whole system, and which must be accounted general,
though some part may be more affected than the rest. Secondly, local
diseases, which originate in a part, and which are to be regarded as
local, though they may sometimes in their progress affect the whole
system, like universal diseases: still however they are to be cured
by remedies, applied not to the whole system, but to the part
affected only.

A pleurisy or peripneumony, for instance, is a general disease,
though the chief seat of the symptoms seems confined to a portion of
the thorax: but the affection of this part, though it may be somewhat
greater th