The medical journals are priding themselves, not without jus- tice,
on the science and skill shown by the physicians of the Prince of Wales in pulling him through his imminent danger, and are dwell- ing on the patience with which the regular and well-known course of the disease's development was watched without any even momen- tary hesitation as to the treatment. This pride is perfectly natural and just ; perhaps even they may be right in quoting, with a sort of triumph in the imaginative force of the expression, the words "of one of the two great clinical authorities to whose care the Prince was entrusted," that "it is not so much that a man has the fever as that he is the fever" (though we should have thought it could not be more correct than to say that "it is not so much that a man is in health as that he is health," which surely wouldn't be quite correct) ; but we do think the theoretic science and skill of the profession might have been more merciful to us in point of grand words. Why were we told, when the temperature of the Prince was gradually becoming lower, that "the process of defervescence continued satisfactorily,"—when the pain above the hip-joint followed the fever, that it was one of "the sequelm of typhoid," and that it was aggravated by "the long accubitus,"— i.e., in plain English, the lying-down ? And why does the profession so acutely enjoy imposing on us with big words that it tells us that in typhoid the fever-process "is a species of pathological parabo- loid, which describes a curve for an average of twenty-eight days?" A paraboloid in a solid figure generated by the revolution of a parabola round its axis ; now, what conceivable meaning can be expressed by saying that a fever-process is a solid figure at all? still more that it is the special kind of solid figure caused by the revolution of a parabola, and most of all, that it is such a solid figure as describes a curve for an average of twenty-eight days? It is all very well for learned medical writers to practise upon the weak nerves of us laymen with their grand technical terms, but at least let them themselves understand the words they use, and not invent them merely to hurl them at and astonish us, as the British Medical Journal uses this unfortunate "pathological paraboloid" that is guilty of describing curves, as if it were a sort of moon, in a periodic time of twenty-eight days.
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