Clinical medicine : observations recorded at the bedside with commentaries / by W.T. Gairdner.

  • Gairdner, W. T. (William Tennant), Sir, 1824-1907.
Date:
1862
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Clinical medicine : observations recorded at the bedside with commentaries / by W.T. Gairdner. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by King’s College London. The original may be consulted at King’s College London.

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    have scarce done anything that has not been done hundreds of times before, or omitted anything that has not been omitted hundreds of times before, on the very same grounds on which these things have been done, or omitted by us. Our treatment has, we trust, been safe, judicious, and successful; but it has not, in the cases in question, been peculiar or novel. Within the limits, however, which we have pre- scribed to ourselves, there is ample scope for all kinds of treatment—good, bad, and indifferent. Have we been then, so much more successful, or so much more lucky than our neighbours, as to be able to draw any inferences favourable in any extraordinary degree to ourselves ? I shall answer this question by appealing to Dr. Haldane’s records, and, to avoid any invidious comparisons, I shall give you the results, not of any one physician’s practice, but of the whole medical practice of the house in that “ princeps morborum acutorum”— pi euro-pneumonia. Not counting cases in which this disease supervened upon chronic (mostly tubercular) organic chest disease, I find four cases only of pleuro- pneumonia which have been examined after death in the entire medical department of this large hospital, since November. One of these was a case of pleuro-pneu- inonia, with, and probably from, chronic disease of the kidney; another was a case, apparently of neglected measles, admitted almost in extremis; a third was a case of double pleurisy after scarlatina, with suppuration of the cellular tissue of the neck ; and the fourth was an instance of severe pneumonia of the left side, in a