The practical medicine of to-day : two addresses delivered before the British Medical Association, and the Epidemiological Society / by Sir William Jenner.

  • Jenner, William, Sir, 1815-1898.
Date:
1869
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: The practical medicine of to-day : two addresses delivered before the British Medical Association, and the Epidemiological Society / by Sir William Jenner. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by King’s College London. The original may be consulted at King’s College London.

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    man who employed the lancet boldly in the treatment of fever Dr. Welche thought it might be said “0 homo! jugulasti febrem.” Now the investigations of the physicians of the past twenty-five years have proved that the disease which Dr. Welche supposed he had killed by blood-letting was a disease which runs a short and definite course, ends spon- taneously on or about the date at which he thought he killed it by blood-letting, and terminates almost always in health under all treatment and without treatment. It is wonderful to observe how few died, though in the hope of killing the fever 120 to 130 ounces of blood were taken from the arm in a few days in several cases. Another great advance in practical Medicine is the recognition of the frequent relation of local lesions to chronic constitutional states. No practitioner would now think of treating a local disease till the diagnosis of the constitutional state had been made. For example, in bronchitis in a child both the prognosis and the treatment will be greatly modified by the fact that the little one is the subject of tuberculosis, of strumosis, of rickets, or of constitutional syphilis. In Bright*s disease both prognosis and treatment will be modified by the fact of the patient being the subject of constitutional gout, of tuberculosis, or of syphilis. So in regard of intracranial diseases, I may instance meningitis, tumour, disease of arteries, interfering with nutrition as local diseases, for the successful treatment of which it is now admitted that a knowledge of the constitu-