Note 646 — BOOK I.—OF THE EPIDEMICS.

I would again request the attention of my contemporaries to the characters of the urine before a crisis, as given by Hippocrates; and, in confirmation of them I will venture to introduce here an extract from Donald Monro’s admirable account of the autumnal remittent fever: “The urine in the beginning was commonly of a high color, though sometimes it was pale and limpid; but when the fever came to remit, there was often a small sediment after each paroxysm; and as the fever was going off, it let fall a sediment in all.” (Army Diseases, etc., p. 159.) The absence of the sediment in the urine before the crisis is an important fact in the history of febrile diseases, which I have reason to think is not now sufficiently adverted to.