Medical and middle-class education : an address delivered at the Chatham-Street School of Medicine, Manchester, on Monday, January 21st, 1856 / by Sir James Kay-Shuttleworth.

  • Kay-Shuttleworth, James, Sir, 1804-1877.
Date:
1856
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Medical and middle-class education : an address delivered at the Chatham-Street School of Medicine, Manchester, on Monday, January 21st, 1856 / by Sir James Kay-Shuttleworth. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by The University of Glasgow Library. The original may be consulted at The University of Glasgow Library.

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    investigation, and thus to lay the only true scientific basis of a chemical pathology. The labours of Prout, Liebig, Brongniart, Prevost, Dumas, and Boussingault, have, by the analysis of organic structure and fluids in animals and vegetables, laid the scientific basis of further discovery. Their researches have already shown the nature of the mutual depen- dence of animal and vegetable life, and their relation to the air and light. Animal and vegetable physiology, therefore, already rests upon results of chemical inquiry, and will yield fm-ther secrets to the microscope, to analysis, and experiment. In lilie manner the phe- nomena of disease must be investigated. The circulating fluids, those humours lubricating tissues, the structures themselves, products stored in sacs and cells, the several excretions, and all the phenomena of disease, will be gradually subjected to a constantly more delicate chemical scrutiny. Such inquuies have already altogether changed the theories of inflammation and fever, and modified those of conges- tion and other conditions of structure. We may hope soon to be able more accurately to distinguish various diatheses, already known to depend to a great degree on the chemical constitution of the fluids, such as those of gout, rheumatism, the phosphatic diathesis, that of albumenuria and oxaluria. In such investigations lies the path to discover whether physicians are right in their suspicions as to the common origin of various tubercular and strumous diseases ; as to the nature of various malignant or encysted tumoitrs; melanotic deposits, and those rare but strange secretions which are sometimes poured from the mucous surfaces, or the ducts of the abdominal viscera. Then, in the almost unexplored region of etiology, such modes of inquiry are indispensable. The fluids are known to have ten times the volume of the solids in the human body. The morbific virus is supposed to infect the blood, and thus produce the cutaneous eruptions of the zymotic diseases, the specific organic changes of the plague, and of various fevers. The discoveries of Dr. Semelweiss as to the mode of the propagation of puerperal fever by the cadaverous poison, and Dr. Budd's discovery of one mode of the dissemination of cholera by a poison evolved in the early stage of the decomposition of the specific secretions, are facts which indicate, though they may not prove, the influence of virus on the constitution of the blood, and the action of that fluid in a state of disease on the solid parts. But, perhaps, the experimentum crucis of this department of observation consists in the discovery of Jenner. The efficiency of vaccination in substituting a mild disease for one most virulent and fatal resulted