, having
participated in and been a witness to the ills and misfortunes that
follow any attempts to "lock horns" with nature through ignorance of
physical laws and preventive medicine,--having been a surgeon's mate in
the fleet which assisted the land forces in the murderous and ill-fated
Carthagena expedition which cost England so many lives, ignorantly and
needlessly sacrificed to ministerial disregard of physical laws and its
consequences,--lessons which, unfortunately, seem to have but little
effect on cabinets, owing to their shifting _personelle_, England
following up the disasters of Carthagena with the still greater blunder
of the Walcheren expedition, where, out of England's small available
physical war material, nearly forty thousand men were either left to
fatten the swamps of Walcheren, or to wander through England in after
years on the pension-list, physical wrecks and in bodily and financial
misery.[37] Again, the same disregard, born of ignorance and red tape,
crippled the British army in the Crimea, causing in its ranks the
greatest mortality. It has seemed as if it would be of advantage if all
the blunders, either philosophical or of statesmanship, committed by a
cabinet, should be written in large letters of gold, to be hung in the
council-halls of the nations, that similar blunders at least might not
occur again.

Dumas, in his "History of the Two Centuries" and his "History of the
Century of Louis the XIV," gives some very interesting medical touches.
Le Sage, in his "Adventures of Gil Blas," gives us food for speculating
on medical philosophy in connection with the interesting subject of how
to make the profession remunerative. Dickens's ideas of the doctor, as
given in his works, are life touches. Witness his description of the
little doctor who superintended little David Copperfield's advent into
the world, or of Dr. Slammer of the army; they represent his view of the
professional character. Fontenelle, probably, was right in ascribing the
fact of his becoming a centenarian, and maintaining a stomach with the
force and resistance that are the peculiar characteristics and
attributes of a chemical retort, to the fact that when sick it was his
practice to throw the doctor's physic out of the window as the doctor
went out of the door, as in his day a man required the constitution of a
rhinoceros and the stomach of an ostrich, with the external
insensibility of a crocodile, to withstand the ordinary do