The following is given as an example of a case of non-interference.  ’A child, above the age of infancy, is chilly, looks dull around its eyes, has headache, pain in the back, quick pulse, and no appetite.  It is not known that the digestive organs have been overtaxed.  The case may prove—­anything.  A local inflammation not yet made manifest by local pain; the commencement of continued, or remittent, or exanthematous fever; in a word, there is scarcely any ailment of children of which this may not be the commencement. If, on careful examination, no local disease can be made out, we have no correct indication for special treatment.  Give nature fair play.  Put the child into a warm bed in a warm room, keep it quiet, stop the supplies of food, but not of water, and wait.  When reaction takes place, if there be anything serious, it shews itself, and we then know what to attend to.  Very frequently, the case is one of mere ephemeral febrile disorder, from exposure to cold; and in two or three days, the child is perfectly well again, without having taken either medicines or globules.  But have we done nothing?  When the heart was striving to restore the balance of the circulation, by adopting the recumbent posture, we gave it less work to do.  The equable warmth of bed was soothing to the nervous system, and solicited the afflux of blood to the surface.  By abstinence, we avoided ministering to congestion of the viscera, and introducing food which, as it could not be properly digested, would decompose and irritate the stomach and bowels.’  Here the do-nothing doctor actually assisted nature; he took care that she should not be thwarted in her operations, and he stood by watching the case, like an attorney at the examination of a prisoner, who does nothing, but whose presence is essential to his client.  If the usual counteracting remedies had been administered, a disease would have been induced, for which a process of convalescence would have had to be gone through.  If the globules had been given simultaneously with the hygienic treatment described, Homoeopathy instead of nature would have had the credit of the cure.

‘In all chronic blood-diseases,’ says Dr Hall, ’medicines are useful, but hygienic treatment’—­the word is explained by the treatment of the above case—­’must rank the first.  In all acute blood-diseases, when mild and occurring in a previously healthy constitution, as they must run through a special course, and last for a certain time, cases will frequently do very well without any medicines.  More frequently, a little medicine occasionally to meet a temporary requirement is serviceable; but in every case of this kind, however severe, the difficult point of medical judgment is, rather, when to do nothing, than what to do.  Hygienic treatment is invariably necessary.  Acting on the principle of the accoucheur, that nature is to be carefully watched, but that so long as she proceeds well, she is to be let alone, we shall meet with few