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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    frequent, and more terrible in its life-wrecking conse- quences. One’s amazement is beyond expression when, lastly, it is found that this disease of untold millions of the past and of others now living, is a confessed mystery to science. Its very name is an absurdity—the non- naming of a trivial symptom, generally not present, of a disease, the very organs affected being unknown, the symptoms indescribable, the cause unknown, the nature unknown, and all treatment absolutely resultless. This bizarre condition of scientific impotence is rendered still more farcical by the fact that, except in one case, not a patient of the 14, nor a physician of their hundreds, recognized the disease before them. They were utterly mystified, and did not even call it by any name. Even Nietzsche argued with his physicians that his terrible disease was not one-sided or hemicranic. The fact of the extreme diversity of the symptoms of the 14 patients, of itself prevented their physicians from recognizing the single cause to which they were due. The nearest they came to it was a half-glimpsed, vague, and passing adumbration of the truth. It was in part a sort of fiattery of the patient, usually by himself originally, that begot the theory that brain working caused sufering. Tbe hundreds of columns of twaddle about “brain-fag ” in the London and American news- papers in October, November, and December, of 1903, show the existence of the same superstition. A thou- sand brain workers have “brain-fag,” but another thou- sand do not. It is plain that the explanation is badly in need of explanation. Intellectual work does not pro- duce disease or suffering any more than muscle work. Evolution has made no such stupid blundering as that. But muscle work with organicly diseased muscles or iblood-making organs does produce trouble, and just so brain work with morbid nervous organs may, and must beget morbid results. The physicians of our 14 patients never once asked if any of the organs put to such fright- ful labor by the intellect were abnormal. The study of the biographic clinics of these patients at once shows that the greatest, most delicate, most complex, most intel- lectual sense organ is, in literary activity, put to the greatest labor. Physiology long since demonstrated that in a large number of these eyes, their anatomy is imperfect, their function pathogenetic. The old truth will never be sufficiently well learned that morbid physiology is the source of pathology, that malfunction ,precedes and begets organic disease. This is forgotten