The result obtained in this instance had not answered our expectation. However, the circulation had for a minute or two resumed its course, and a flash of reason had once more shown itself.
I thought the experiment ought to be repeated, and accordingly the next morning I made another trial. The patient this time was a working shoemaker, thirty-eight years of age, exactly in the same far-gone, hopeless state as the patient of the day before. In his case, the inward commotion caused by the injection was more powerful; twenty minutes after the injection he was able to see, to understand, to speak, to raise his head; but this vital recovery was, as in the former case, but of short continuance, and two hours and a half after the operation the man expired.
After these experiments I dissected the two bodies, and then, finding that their lungs were infiltrated with water, I understood that the alkaline solution had not been assimilated, that it had stopped in its passage into the pulmonary parenchyma, to the detriment of the functions of the hæmatosis. I also understood that the proper injection, instead of distilled alkaline water, would have been the serum of the blood, drawn at the very moment from some man or animal.
The conclusion which I drew from these experiments was that a variety of operations, made at different stages of the malady, might lead to beneficial results, especially if we succeeded in transmitting the cholera to animals, as that would enable us to test a large number of curative agents and to pursue a methodical course of experimentalization.
From all I have said, I infer that life, health, and disease, being subject to the same laws throughout the whole animal kind, it is certain that the physician should possess precise knowledge as to the organization, the functions, and diseases of animals. That by proceeding in this manner, we shall advance from the simple to the complex, from the plant to the animal, and from the animal to man. That we must of necessity emerge from the state in which we are now entangled BY FOUNDING AND ESTABLISHING IN LONDON A COLLEGE OF THE NATURAL AND MEDICAL SCIENCES. Every medical pupil might spend two years in this college, receiving in it an experimental and practical training; he would devote himself in it to the chemical analysis of all bodies, to physiological experiments and tests, without limit and of every kind.