A treatise on the diseases of the chest and on mediate auscultation / by R.T.H. Laennec ; translated from the French by John Forbes.

Date:
1827
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: A treatise on the diseases of the chest and on mediate auscultation / by R.T.H. Laennec ; translated from the French by John Forbes. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh. The original may be consulted at the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh.

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    tendance on hospital practice, and should teach them, that to record every important case they meet with, is not only a most useful labour at the time, but may eventually lead, as in the case of the subject of this memoir, to results of the highest con- sequences to themselves and their profession. At an eaily pe- riod of his labours, he began to communicate some of their re- sults to the public, and was honoured with signal marks of pro- fessional distinction. In the year 1802, being then in his 2ist year, he published in the Journal dc Medecinet at that time con- ducted by Corvisart, Leroux and Boyer, several papers of sin- gular merit; and likewise obtained the two chief prizes in medi- cine and surgery, granted by the Minister of the Interior, through the then Institute of France. His first paper consists of an in- teresting case of diseased heart, and appeared in the number for Mcssidor, An. x. (1802)*. Two months later in the same year (Fructidor an x.) he published his Histoires d’ Inflama- tion du Peritoine\, consisting of a series of cases detailed in a very clear and satisfactory manner, illustrated by much learned annotation, and terminated by general conclusions, spe- cifying the anatomical characters and signs of peritonitis in a more accurate manner than had been previously done. This memoir, which has the great merit of being six years anterior to the publication of Broussais’s Phlegmasies Chroniques, is well worthy the attention of pathologists. It bears the impress of great learning and talent, and could not fail to give great pro- mise of subsequent eminence in its youthful author. He ap- pears, about the same time, to have commenced his career as a critic or reviewer, (a character in which he was afterwards con- spicuous for many years,) as there appears in the same volume of the Journ. de Med. (p. 565) a review of the French Translation of Benjamin Bell’s Treatise on the Venereal disease, bearing (as is usual in France) the name of the reviewer, It. T. II. Laennec, at its head. In the same year he gave as striking a proof of his superior knowledge of natural anatomy, as he had previously done of his pathological knowledge in his Essay on Peritonitis, by the pub-? lication of his Lettre sur les tuniques qui cnveloppent certains visceres addressed to Dupuytren, then principal anatomist in the School of Medicine]:. In this memoir his object was to describe more particularly than had been done before, a peculiar tunic of certain viscera, particularly the liver, spleen, and kidney, * Journ. dcMcd. t. iv. p. 295. t Ibid. p. 499. t Journ. dc Med. t. v. p. 539, (Venlose an. xi).