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until it was removed on the ninth day, at which time theeruption had completely involved the diseased structure. Thepustules ran through their usual course, and in due time aslough was detached, and the ulcerated surface healed rapidly,the resulting cicatrix being scarcely noticed. Eight similarcases were then successively narrated, in all of which the samesimple method of treatment was adopted with like success, theonly exception being in one of them where the cure was onlypartial, in consequence of the tumour having been situated toonear the angle of the orbit to permit the free use of the tartaremetic plaster. In all the other cases the scars which resultedwere comparatively slight. He then exhibited a patient onwhom he had thus operated for two nævi, one of which beingsituated on either brow; the cicatrices which had followed,though large, were not unsightly.

After some general conversation respecting the treatment ofthese cases by escharotics, and, the difficulty of limiting orcontrolling their action, the Society adjourned until Friday,March 3rd, when it was announced that-

Dr. CAHILL would offer some remarks on the Treatment ofSmall-pox.

Reviews and Notices of Books.

Memoirs of John Abernethy, F.R.S., with a TTieev of hisLectures, Writings, and Cltai-ucter. By GEORGE MACIL-WAIN, F.R.C.S. 2 vols. 8vo, pp. 342, 376. London: Hurstand Blackett, 1853.

MR. MACILWAIN commences the fifth chapter of his secondvolume by assuring us that " lecturing after a fashion is easyenough," but that " teaching is a very different affair." Weare not of opinion that we can begin this notice of our author’slabours better than by assuring him that. whilst manufacturinga book is easy enough, writing a good biography is altogether adifferent matter. We confess that from the first time we heardof Mr. Macilwain’s intention to indite the memoirs of Aber-

nethy until we took them in our hands for perusal, we felt verysceptical as to what might be their value; but that now havingclosed the last of their more than 700 pages, our doubts have

given place to the certitude that it is scarcely above nothing.Not of course that such deficiency belongs to the subject of thebiography Mr. Macilwain has grappled with, but because thelatter has been regardless of the valuable axiom of Abernethyhimself-viz., that a man must have a clear idea of what hedesires to do, or he will fail in selecting the proper means ofaccomplishing it, (p. 10, vol. i.) Such scepticism as we haveadmitted did not arise from prejudice or ill-feeling, but wasthe result of our acquaintance with Mr. Macilwain’s previouswritings. We knew that the first duty of a good biographeris to constantly keep his hero in view, and himself out of sight,as much as possible; we knew that the writer of the life ofanother person, for whom high respect is pretended, shouldhave that delicate reverence for his subject, and considerationfor his readers, as would insure an open and free arena for thewritten portraiture of the one, and freedom from an obtrusionof the vain and fussy opinions of the other. It was this, and thedread of Mr. Macilwain’s rapid departure from his proper topic,in order to philosophise before the reader, and our acqaintancewith the life and opinions of Mr. Macilwain himself, which madeus tremble for the intimated delineation of the past surgeonof St. Bartholomew’s. We were aware that the former had

previously imagined he had reason to complain; for we remem-bered his laments on " the hardship under which men labourwho have little but their own enthusiasm to cheer them on

through the, alas! too lonely path of inductive inquiry;"* andwe feared that he might again press upon the public attentionthat "inductive philosophy" which ive as equally expectedordinary mortals would once more rebel against, at least afterpassing through the alembic of Mr. Macilwain. Nor in this

respect have we been mistaken." It will be our endeavour to point out the position occupied* The General Xature and Treatment of Tumours. By George Macilwain,

F.R.C.S., &c.

by Abernethy in that (as we trust) gradually dawning science,to a particular phase of which our object and our limits willalike restrict our attention,—We mean that period whensurgery, having approached to something like a zenith as amere practical art, began to exhibit, by slow and almost im-perceptible degrees, some faint characters of science-a shadowycommencement of a metamorphose, which we believe promisesto convert (though we fear at a period yet distant) a monstroushybrid of mystery and conjecture into the symmetrical beautyof an inductive science-a science based on axioms and lawspowerfully influential to the social progress and to the healthof nations. "-p. 9, vol. i.

" In the meantime, science, instead of being in a position to,receive every quackery as a means of demonstrating thesuperior beauty of truth by placing it in contrast with error, isobliged to regard any absurdity, however gross, as one of thahydra-headed fallacies, through which we are to evolve what istrue only by the circuitous path of exhausting the resources ofhypothesis and conjecture, whilst sweeping epidemics, which,wholesomely regarded, should be looked on reverently as besomsof destruction," &c. &c.-p. 258, vol. ii.

" Here was a suggestion in the true spirit of philosophicalinquiry; but the fault lay in the suppressed premise that therelatz:ons of the so-called tumours were comprehended. Theold division, in which all sorts of diseases were jumbled togetherunder the general name of tumours, defective as it might be,was much more auspicious had it ever been made the subjectof a really philosophical inquiry, because the diversity of thephenomena," &c. &c.-p. 215, vol. ii.

" In Abernethy there was a polarity of character, an in-dividuality, a positiveness of type, which," &c. &c.—p. 22,vol. i.

But enough of this positive absurdity, the more positivelyabsurd as coming from one who informs us that " to hear somelecturers one would almost think that they adopted the defini-tion of language which is reported of Talleyrand, that it wasintended to conceal our ideas. Some make simple things verymuch otherwise by their mode of explaining them"-(p. 90,vol. ii.) Extensively as Mr. Macilwain has displaced Mr.Abernethy for the purpose of exhibiting anew his own inductivephilosophy, we are not sure that the latter person has not alsosuffered from his biographer’s imagination to some slightextent, as, for instance, when Mr. Macilwain imagines him,a boy, standing with his hands in his pockets, "his pocketscontaining perhaps a few shillings, some halfpence, and &

knife with the ’point broken, a pencil, together with &

tolerably accurate sketch of ’Old Robertson’s wig’" (p. 23?vol. i.) Indeed, sometimes the author appears to be rather ata loss to determine whether to court the Muses or sterner

philosophy; for the quotations from Horace, Terence, Ovid,Pope, Longfellow, &c. &c., are almost endless, and the openingof the seventh chapter of the first volume commences thus :-" One of the most beautiful poems in the English language,perhaps, is ’Armstrong’s Art of Health."’-p. 106.Next to the nauseating, stilted, continuously gasping, and

unintelligible efforts of Mr. Macilwain’s " inductive philo-sophy," we dislike his disposition to talk of the prccctice ofmedicine and surgery in a way which is both unwarranted initself and peculiarly unbecoming as proceeding from a rotu-rier in the profession. Alluding to Sir Charles Blick, it isremarked-

" Sir Charles’s manipulatory and operative proceedingsseem, however, to have represented a tolerably adroit adoptionof the prevailing modes of practice; while his medical surgeryconsisted chiefly of the empirical employment of such remediesas he had found most frequently successful, or, at all events,somehow or other associated with a successful issue, with theabsence of any investigation of the cause of either success orfailure. By a mind like Abernethy’s this sort of routinewould be very soon acquired, and in a short time estimated atits real value."—p. 43, vol. i.

Not so soon as Mr. Macilwain supposes, and the nature ofthe value likewise different from that he would place upon it,as the following quotation from one of Mr. Abernethy’s lecturesproves:-

’’ I place before you the most animating incentive e know

217

of-that is, the enviable power of being extensively useful toyour fellow-creatures. You will be able to confer that whichsick kings would fondly purchase with their diadems, whichwealth cannot command, nor state nor rank bestow - toalleviate or remove disease, the most insupportable of humanafflictions, and thereby give health, the most invaluable ofhuman blessings."To all this Mr. Macilwain of course is assisted by " inductive

philosophy;" but clinical practitioners, by the "adroit adoptionof the prevailing modes of practice," the " employment ofremedies found most frequently successful," and other triflesof the sort, which will be found in different portions of the"Memoirs" to be contemptuously despised. It may be, how-ever, that the public, for whom Mr. Macilwain has chieflywritten, prefers medicine regarded from the philosophic height ;nevertheless, we are free to confess the following remarks donot exactly tend towards that opinion :-

" We hope to show in these volumes that the public havenot only a very real interest in a sound common-sense view ofthe objects of medicine and surgery, but a far deeper interestthan it is possible for any one medical man to have merely assuch or all medical men put together."-p. 12, vol. i.

To assist this " common-sense view" is the purport, wepresume, of the following style of writing --

" If you could take away everything but the nerves, youwould have the brain, spinal marrow, and certain knot-likepieces of nervous substance, (ganglions, as we term them,)from which myriads of cords proceeded. "-p. 158, vol. i.

" When you strike the ulnar nerve at the elbow, (popularly’termed sometimes the funny-bone,) you feel it in the finger.p. 159, vol. i.

" If you place your finger in cold or warm water, the actionwhich makes you feel it is in the brain. "-p. 159, vol. i.

"This blowing-up is called from the Greek word for it,emphysema."—p. 223, vol. i.

" Digestion is on the whole a manufacture. "-p. 267, vol. i." The impressions of sound are first received on the parch-

ment of a little drum. "-p. 269, vol. i." We know that if a mote gets into the eye, there is irrita-

tion immediately; there is flow of blood to the part, a glandpours forth an abundant supply of tears, and the substance isprobably washed out. Very well, we say, that is intelligible."- p. 299, vol. i.

Would that we could say so of the following, by which,after we have been warned that as regards "erysipelas, wewrongly

"Acquire a tendency, as every day’s experience shows, toregard it as a kind of abstraction or as an entity. "-p. 260,vol. i.

We are informed that

"Erysipelas is nothing more than a natural law obscured."- p. 261, vol. i.

But if we also feel obscurity, our author feels tired; for atlength, quite exhausted, he says :-

" I cannot go on with the multitudinous illustrations of theseprinciples. "-p. 306, vol. i.

Though at the outset he thus spoke-" I shall say little of the difficulties of the task. I feel them

to have been onerous, and I believe them to have been in somerespects unexampled. "-p. ix.

In order that the professional reader may have some notionof the " common-sense views" taught the public by Mr. Macil-wain, we lay before him the following extracts :-

" We have sometimes thought it would be useful to bothparties if, in addition to the inquiries and advice given at con-sultation, a medical man should have brief printed digests ofthe general nature and relations of most of the well-defineddiseases. A careful perusal of one of these would help the I,patients to comprehend the nature and objects of the advicegiven, tend to the diffusion of useful knowledge, and in timehelp them to understand whether their treatment were con-ducted on scientific views, or merely a sort of respectable em-piricism. What is here intended might be printed on a sheetof note-paper," &c.—p. 317, vol. i.

Alluding to the dislike of a surgeon for the father of a young

lady to be present during the consultation with the other prac-titioner, and the consequent result, it is observed:-

" What ! could not a father hear the honest opinion of twomen concerning his child until the consultation had been shorndown and dovetailed together, so as to be made a symmetricalnondescript adapted to the requisitions of a vulgar conven-tionalism?"-p. 152, vol. ii.

As regards the publication of lectures in the medical perio--dicals, " as now practised," -Mr. Macilwain is" Afraid that, however advantageous it may be to the trade

to obtain gratuitously these bulky contributions to their .columns, we have serious doubts if it be any advantage toscience or to the character of our periodical literature."-p. 211, vol. ii.

Though as respects the proprietors themselves, they" Are not likely to quarrel with that which they get for

nothing. "-p. 211, vol. ii.

We cannot part from our " inductive philosopher" yet, forwe have still left us the painful duty of expressing ourdissatisfaction both with the sometimes superciliousness, andat other times patronising manner in which Mr. Macilwain sitsin judgment on his professional brethren. It so happened, forinstance, that Mr. Stanley and Mr. Abernethy had some dis-agreement in connexion with the anatomical lectures and de-monstrations, and relative to which, " as we had no desireto conceal anything ... we wrote to Mr. Stanley to say tbzif there were any evidence," &c., (p. 249, vol. ii.;) and to alwhich Mr. Stanley simply stated his " disinclination" to enterfurther into the matter. As a consequence of the " inductive

philosophy" Mr. Macilwain then finds he cannot " insult thecommon sense" of his readers (p. 253) by attempting Mr.Abernethy’s defence; that

" The stormy virtue of some people is very amusing. Whenother people’s interests are alone concerned, it is like whathurricanes are now said to be-enormous whirlwinds, intowhose vortices everybody’s faults are drawn with indiscriminatevoracity, &c. "-p. 254, vol. ii.

Finally, we may remark that the two volumes before usexhibit more of the biographer than of Abernethy; and thisfact seems not altogether beyond the prescience of our -p7tilo-sopher, for having at p. 130, vol. i., finished off Mr. Abernethy,for the time being, on the subject of fracture of the neck of thethigh-bone, and having indulged the reader with the Macil-wainean philosophy to the middle of the 157th page, thebiographer surprisedly and abruptly concludes his paragraphby ejaculating-" But where is Abernethy?"

Foreign Department.M. VELPEAu’s Opinion of the lralzce of the Microscope in

Cancerous Tumours of the Breast.IN the work lately published " On the Diseases of the

Breast," M. Velpeau expresses himself touching the value ofthe microscope for the diagnosis of cancerous tumours of thebreast as follows :-

" If by means of the microscope it were possible to arrive ata ’knowledge of the intimate nature of pathological products,the instrument would be of great practical value. The

diagnosis of cancer would acquire much certainty, and lose itsvague and unsatisfactory nature, as nothing is more easy thanto obtain small fragments of cancerous tumours by means ofthe grooved needle, &c. Some microscopists of the presenttime do not hesitate to believe in these wondrous results, butmy remarks on the cancerous cell, in another part of the work,will prevent my readers from crediting such things. Micro-scopical examinations may determine the nature of canceroustumours, when the latter are removed from the body ;but, in a clinical point of view, these examinations lead, inthe present state of knowledge, to dangerous errors, if anyimportance were attached to them. When, by the bed-side ofthe patient, the microscopist declares that the cell submittedto his examination is of a cancerous kind, can the surgeon takesuch a declaration as a rule of conduct? Will anyone form adecided opinion upon so uncertain a testimony? But this is