Medical life and work : an address to students, introductory to a course of lectures on practice of medicine / by T.K. Monro.

  • Monro, Thomas Kirkpatrick, 1865-1958.
Date:
1913
Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

Credit: Medical life and work : an address to students, introductory to a course of lectures on practice of medicine / by T.K. Monro. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by The Royal College of Surgeons of England. The original may be consulted at The Royal College of Surgeons of England.

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    yet to cure it. But at any moment we may hear of the discovery of a cure for one or more of these diseases of which I have been speaking. As Mr. A. N. Whitehead points out, in his recently published Introduction to Mathematics,1 it is “ a fact which is being continually verified in the history of knowledge, namely, that some of the greatest discoveries are to be made among the most well-known topics.” He makes this remark in connection with Descartes’ epoch-making conception of the application of algebra to geometry, an idea which occurred to the great philosopher one morning in the seventeenth century as he lay in bed. At that time geometry had already been studied for two thousand years, for Euclid was born about 330 B.C., and even he only systematised and extended the work of a long series of predecessors. After his time geometry was made the subject of study by generation after generation of mathematicians of diverse race and training and circumstance—Egyptians, Greeks, Arabs, and Germans—before Descartes hit upon the method of co-ordinates. To a certain extent, and in a small way, we have an analogy in the recognition of the ankylostomum duodenale, a small nematode worm, as the cause of a dangerous form of anaemia. Epidemic anaemia was met with in French miners more than a hundred years ago (from 1803-4 onwards), and in the tropics the disease was known for several centuries before its nature was understood. The worm itself has been known for three-quarters of a century (since Dubini dis- covered it, in Milan, in 1838), but some fifteen years more elapsed before the connection between the worm and the anaamia was established through the work of Bilharz and Griesinger in 1853 and 1854. I^was much later still, namely, in connection with the deadly outbreak among the workers at the St. Gothard tunnel in 1880 that Perroncito, of Turin, demonstrated the truly formidable role played by this parasite. Perroncito further recommended that the ova of 1 London : Williams & Norgate, p. 114.