PHYSICAL CHARACTERISTICS and his biographer, Parton, goes so far as to say so. But upon inquiry among learned physicians I cannot find that they recognize him as a dis- coverer, or that he has any standing on this ques- tion in medical history. It would seem that he merely collected and expressed the observations of others as well as his own ; none of them were en- tirely new, and many of them are now considered unsound. Nearer to the truth is Parton' s statement that " he was the first effective preacher of the blessed gospel of ventilation." He certainly studied that subject very carefully, and was an authority on it, being appointed while in England to prepare a plan for ventilating the Houses of Parliament It would, however, be better to say that he was one of the most prominent advocates of ventilation rather than the first effective preacher of it ; for in Bigelow's edition of his works* will be found an excellent essay on the subject in which the other advocates are mentioned. But Parton goes on to say, "He spoke, and the windows of hospitals were lowered ; consumption ceased to gasp and fever to inhale poi- son ;" which is an extravagant statement that he would find difficulty, I think, in supporting. In Franklin's published works there is a short essay called " A Conjecture as to the Cause of the Heat of the Blood in Health and of the Cold and Hot Fits of Some Fevers." The blood is heated, he says, by friction in the action of the heart, by the
- Vol. iv. p. 271.
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