Lecture, introductory to a course of clinical medicine / [Samuel Wright].

  • Wright, Samuel
Date:
1847
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Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Lecture, introductory to a course of clinical medicine / [Samuel Wright]. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    teristic of medical practice in its infancy; to be able to judge of it by signs, is an obligation we owe to pathological anatomy. The accumulation of a vast number of facts, illustrative of organic changes, and the connection of these changes with particular indications manifested during life, is the great source of our present certainty in the diagnosis, and success in the treatment, of disease. It is a knowledge of these things that so strikingly distinguishes the medical practice of the present day, from that of days gone by. The great errors of the earlier schoolmen, as compared with our¬ selves, arose from their not being in possession of those sterling truths which modern research has placed at our service; and our successors in the art and science of heal¬ ing, will be wiser and more skilful than we are, in proportion as the experience of ages disposes its accumulating treasures in their hands. These treasures are facts; and we cannot wish better to our profession, than to anticipate with Bichat, the arrival of that day, when the science of medicine “ will be nothing but a succession of facts, strictly deduced from each other.’5 Now, it was the absence of these things, or rather, an insufficient number of them, that gave rise to a faulty symp¬ tomatology, and rendered diagnosis a frequent matter of hazard. The Nosology of Cullen, though in many respects a masterpiece of ingenuity and judgment, is yet a conspi¬ cuous failure for want of a proper pathological basis. To give you only one illustration in point; the Cullenian Nosology regards phthisis as an affection of the lungs; but our pathology tells us that, in phthisis pulmonalis, the lungs are merely the organs in which the product of dis¬ eased function is deposited. The lungs are rendered morbid, not 'per se, but by the mechanical lodgment, and subsequent decomposition, within them, of adventitious animal matter. This matter, so far as at present we know, owes its existence