Phthisis and the stethoscope : a concise practical guide to the physical diagnosis of consumption / by Richard Payne Cotton.

  • Cotton, Richard Payne, 1820-1877.
Date:
1851
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Phthisis and the stethoscope : a concise practical guide to the physical diagnosis of consumption / by Richard Payne Cotton. Source: Wellcome Collection.

    26/116 (page 12)
    I 1- INTRODUCTORY. sounds of the heart as a guide to phthisis, it is essential to recollect, that in young children and nervous persons, particularly hysterical females, they are often audible over the whole chest, varying in loudness according to the distance from the heart; and that the same thing may occur, to some extent, in aged persons, and those whose thoracic walls are much emaciated. Having thus shown, as briefly as is consistent with the importance of the subject, what must be ever remembered in examining the chest of a person supposed to be phthisical; and having fairly stated both the certainty of some laws, and the exceptionable character of others, I may sum up the whole, by stating, that there is not one which should be trusted, by itself, in diagnosis, but that several of them ought to be employed, in order that one may be tested by another. But even if they be found to harmonize in their results, we have yet to bear in mind that physical signs by themselves, as a general rule, determine nothing more than physical condition*, or, in other words, declare the physical, and not the pathological condition of the lungs ; hence it is, that we require the use of other rules, as well as