Page:Transactions of the Provincial Medical and Surgical Association, volume 1.djvu/68

 of health may continue uninterrupted, and the reality of its existence be void of suspicion. If, in this state, too, through any exciting cause, an acute accession of disease arise, this will be regarded as of sudden occurrence, and the exciting cause will be exclusively blamed. Medical reasoning, in this respect, needs some correction, and practitioners are called on to pay more attention than they have hitherto done to incipient disease. The investigation will amply repay them, not only in the greater power which it will give for employing with effect prophylactic treatment, but in the light which an intimate knowledge of incipient disease cannot fail to shed on the more advanced and more complicated stages.

On the present occasion it is my desire to be brief. Where hints suffice, elaborate discussion would be impertinent. The few which I have offered are, I trust, not unworthy the attention of those to whom they are addressed; and it would be a gratification to me if further illustrations were now to come from other hands. It remains only to offer a few remarks on the employment of remedies. The practice of physic may, according to the intellect, cultivation, and moral qualities of the individual pursuing it, be regarded as a science, an art, or a trade. So obvious is the application of the terms, that they need no explanation. The latter distinction was long ago made by a shrewd observer of human nature and the world. Swift, who, in a gloomy fit, laments, among other desolation's, his being

" Deprived of kind Arbuthnot's aid. Who knew his art, but not his trade."