[3]. Histeria a frigore. Hysteric paroxysms are occasioned by whatever suddenly debilitates the system, as fear, or cold, and perhaps sometimes by external moisture of the air, as all delicate people have their days of greater or less debility, see Class [IV. 3. 1. 8].

[4]. Nausea pluvialis. Sickness at the commencement of a rainy season is very common among dogs, who assist themselves by eating the agrostris canina, or dog's grass, and thus empty their stomachs. The same occurs with less frequency to cats, who make use of the same expedient. See Sect. XVI. 11. I have known one person, who from his early years has always been sick at the beginning of wet weather, and still continues so. Is this owing to a sympathy of the mucous membrane of the stomach with the mechanical relaxation of the external cuticle by a moister atmosphere, as is seen in the corrugated cuticle of the hands of washing-women? or does it sympathize with the mucous membrane of the lungs, which must be affected along with the mucus on its surface by the respiration of a moister atmosphere?

SUPPLEMENT TO CLASS IV.

Sympathetic Theory of Fever.

As fever consists in the increase or diminution of direct or reverse associated motions, whatever may have been the remote cause of them, it properly belongs to the fourth class of diseases; and is introduced at the end of the class, that its great difficulties might receive elucidation from the preceding parts of it. These I shall endeavour to enumerate under the following heads, trusting that the candid reader will discover in these rudiments of the theory of fever a nascent embryon, an infant Hercules, which Time may rear to maturity, and render serviceable to mankind.

[I].Simple fever of two kinds.
[II].Compound fever.
[III].Termination of the cold fit.
[IV].Return of the cold fit.
[V].Sensation excited in fever.
[VI].Circles of associated motions.
[VII].Alternations of cold and hot fits.
[VIII].Orgasm of the capillaries.
[IX].Torpor of the lungs.
[X].Torpor of the brain.
[XI].Torpor of the heart and arteries.
[XII].Torpor of the stomach and intestines.
[XIII].Case of continued fever explained.
[XIV].Termination of continued fever.
[XV].Inflammation excited in fever.
[XVI].Recapitulation.

[I]. Simple fever.

[1]. When a small part of the cutaneous capillaries with their mucous or perspirative glands are for a short time exposed to a colder medium, as when the hands are immersed in iced water for a minute, these capillary vessels and their glands become torpid or quiescent, owing to the eduction of the stimulus of heat. The skin then becomes pale, because no blood passes through the external capillaries; and appears shrunk, because their sides are collapsed from inactivity, not contracted by spasm; the roots of the hair are left prominent from the seceding or subsiding of the skin around them; and the pain of coldness is produced.