The life-study of patients, or the biographic and multiple biographic method of discovering medical truth / by George M. Gould.

  • Gould, George Milbrey, 1848-1922.
Date:
1904
Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

Credit: The life-study of patients, or the biographic and multiple biographic method of discovering medical truth / by George M. Gould. 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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    to be comparatively healthy, while the others are con- stantly afflicted with much sutfering. In some cases their physical diseases will result in the profoundest tragedies. Thus Gladstone, Goethe, Taine, Kant, Mommsen, Gibbon, Zola, Verdi, Agassiz, Fiske, Long- fellow, Lowell, Hawthorne, etc., leading sedentary and scholarly lives, possess good health, while we find that other men of the same callings and application to litera- ture or science, endure lives of intense suffering. Of this class are George Eliot, Huxley, De Quincey, the Carlyles, Parkman, Browning, Wagner, Spencer, Whit- tier, Margaret Fuller, Lewes, Darwin, Nietzsche, etc. The attitude of the world, even of the medical pro- fession, in the presence of disease has been one of fatalism. Indeed, the belief in fate, one may surmise, has been largely due to the strange and mysterious incidence of disease. Why one should be sick and another free from sickness has struck men’s minds ever! since the riddle of life worried the soul of the boil-pestered Job. So long as the physician was concerned with his patient’s single and passing (or kill- ing) ailment, he gained no large overlook to bring unity into the pathologic problem of a whole life, or of a num- ber of lives. And viewing disease as an objective entity, studying it from the standpoint of morbidity, infectious or organic, does not yield the same results as in viewing it from the aspect of the patient, the whole life of the patient, and the whole lives of many patients. Take the 14 mentioned: If one physician could have treated all of them during their entire lives he would undoubtedly have seen that there was some single underlying unity and cause for all their afflictions. But as the single complaint was treated at one time by one, or even several physicians, and as a hundred were con- sulted during their lives, all the cases remained discrete, mysterious, and utterly inexplaiuable. Moreover, look- ing into the minds of their physicians we find that not one had any conception whatever of the cause and nature of their patients’ maladies, and not one agreed with the other as to treatment. A peculiarly instructive fact is also this: Many symptoms complained of by these patients were held by both patient and doctor to be merely accidental and concurrent, which were repeated in other cases, and which were, in fact, bound by a single cause into a strictly pathologic unity. By the method of focussing the clinical life and a number of clinical biographies into a composite whole, new truths at once