ent, and my own experiences
in California.

HYGIENIC CHANGE OF AIR.

The age of hygiene is rapidly approaching, when the exhibition of
drugs will be the exception instead of the rule in medical treatment.
For this reason, the effect of climate on disease is rising into a
subject of first-rate importance, and, no longer a prejudice or a
tradition, submits to the investigations of science. The chief recent
writers on what we already presume to call climatology, are Sir James
Clark in England, Schouw in Sweden, and Carriere in France; and now
there comes Dr Burgess, armed with the united authority of these
physicians, and with his own experience, to indoctrinate the public as
well as the profession. His book is of moderate size and price, and we
recommend it to all invalids, whether they are able to travel abroad,
or are confined by circumstances to their own country; but in the
meantime, as the subject is both new and interesting to general
readers, we propose giving them an inkling of what it contains.[2]

We do not mean that the subject of climate is new in itself:
it is only new in its treatment. We have all, from our earliest
youth, heard of the effects of climate; we have all been brought
up to believe in certain foreign places; and we have all observed that
when--consumption, for instance--approaches its last stage (rarely
before), it is shipped off, as a matter of course, for Italy or the
south of France. And, alas! we have all heard from the wan lips of the
stricken one excluded by poverty from the privilege of foreign travel:
'If I could but get to a warm climate, I should live!' Such notions,
right or wrong, depended exclusively upon habit or prejudice. Experience
had no effect upon them, any more than it had upon the orthodox course
of medicines which entitled the death of a patient to be considered
professionally legitimate. Sometimes, indeed, the venue was changed, and
one place became more fashionable than another to die in. Here the group
of English tombs grew gray and ancient, and there a new city of the
silent sprang up with the suddenness of an American emporium. But still
the cry was: 'A warm climate! Give us Italy, or we perish!'

But we need not say the cry _was_: it continues to this moment. Such
impressions are long of being dispelled; it takes a great many years
for the voice of doubt even to reach completely the public ear; and we
think it a privilege to be able to take such advantage