A plea for 'thoroughness' : introductory address delivered at the Yorkshire College, Leeds, at the opening of the session, October 1st, 1889 / by W.T. Gairdner.

  • Gairdner, Sir William Tennant, (1824-1907)
Date:
1889
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: A plea for 'thoroughness' : introductory address delivered at the Yorkshire College, Leeds, at the opening of the session, October 1st, 1889 / by W.T. Gairdner. 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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    humours, this or that materies morbi, this or that entirely supposititious or hypothetical change in the blood, in the nervous system, in the solids of the body, according as the man speaking to you was a humoralist or a solidist. A very few obvious indications sufficed here for the diagnosis—i.e., to enable the fever to be placed in the nosology, and so to get a name. The treatment followed almost as a matter of course from the name, or rather from the theories or hypo- thesis connected with the name, according to the school or system of doctrine in which the observer had been trained. Now, I am far from saying that this method of viewing and of treating disease is altogether extinct, even at the present day ; but I am free to affirm that it has been very much modified. Any one of you, gentlemen, after only a four, years’ curriculum, will be in a position to form a far more direct, sounder, and less ambiguous judgment upon many cases of fever and acute disease than any man who wrote at large upon them, even in the first third of the present century; because you will have to apply tests, and to use methods of observation, and physical means for the detection of local changes, which were then almost unknown. Do not let this assurance, however, make you conceited or contemptuous of our forefathers : there is still plenty of room to say that neither they nor we have anything like a complete knowledge of any fever or any acute disease. When I hear a man talking at large and dogmatically about “ biliousness ” (a term of Abernethy’s, which neither Abernethy nor anyone else has been able to explain further