reased regard to
temperature, and he lives on. Another abandons all medicine, and throws
himself into the open arms of Nature, and thus prolongs, for a few
months or a few years, his existence. If this is _cure_, then we may
have all or nearly all of our consumptives cured, some of them a great
many times over. Some few aged practitioners may be found to have cured,
during the long years of their medical practice, more than five thousand
persons of this description.

There is no higher or larger sense than this in which any individual has
cured five thousand, or five hundred, or even fifty persons a year, of
consumption. On this, a misguided, misinformed public may reply: Many,
indeed, revive a little, as the lamp sometimes brightens up in its last
moments; but this very revival or flickering only betokens a more speedy
and certain dissolution.

On the other hand, predisposition to consumption no more renders it
necessary that we should die of this disease in early life, at an
average longevity of less than thirty years, than the loading and
priming of a musket or piece of artillery renders it necessary that
there should be an immediate or early explosion. Without an igniting
spark there will be no discharge in a thousand years. In like manner, a
person may be "loaded and primed" for consumption fifty years, if not
even a hundred, without the least necessity of "going off," provided
that the igniting spark can be kept away. Our power to protect life,
both in the case of consumption and many more diseases, is in proportion
to our power to withhold the igniting spark.

And herein it is that medical skill is needful in this dreadful disease,
and ought to be frequently and largely invoked. If the estimate which
has been made by Prof. Hooker, of Yale College, that one in five of the
population of the northern United States die of consumption, is correct,
then not less than two millions of the present inhabitants of New
England, New York, Pennsylvania, and Ohio, are destined, as things now
are, to die of this disease. What a thought! Can it be so?

Can it be that two millions of the ten millions now on the stage of
action in the northern United States, are not only _predisposed_ to
droop and die, but are laid under a constitutional necessity of so
doing? Must the igniting spark be applied? Must the disease be "touched
off" with hot or impure air, by hard colds, by excitements of body and
mind, and in a thousand and one ot