intelligent obedience to their recommendations.

Listening to ordinary talk about health, disease, and death, one is
often led to entertain a doubt whether the speakers believe that the
course of natural causation runs as smoothly in the human body as
elsewhere. Indications are too often obvious of a strong, though
perhaps an unavowed and half unconscious, under-current of opinion that
the phenomena of life are not only widely different, in their
superficial characters and in their practical importance, from other
natural events, but that they do not follow in that definite order
which characterises the succession of all other occurrences, and the
statement of which we call a law of nature.

Hence, I think, arises the want of heartiness of belief in the value of
knowledge respecting the laws of health and disease, and of the
foresight and care to which knowledge is the essential preliminary,
which is so often noticeable; and a corresponding laxity and
carelessness in practice, the results of which are too frequently
lamentable.

It is said that among the many religious sects of Russia, there is one
which holds that all disease is brought about by the direct and special
interference of the Deity, and which, therefore, looks with repugnance
upon both preventive and curative measures as alike blasphemous
interferences with the will of God. Among ourselves, the "Peculiar
People" are, I believe, the only persons who hold the like doctrine in
its integrity, and carry it out with logical rigour. But many of us are
old enough to recollect that the administration of chloroform in
assuagement of the pangs of child-birth was, at its introduction,
strenuously resisted upon similar grounds.