Principles of diagnosis and treatment in heart affections / by Sir James Mackenzie.

  • Mackenzie, James, 1853-1925.
Date:
1916
Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

Credit: Principles of diagnosis and treatment in heart affections / by Sir James Mackenzie. Source: Wellcome Collection.

    19/280 (page 7)
    is due to the fact that the physician himself does not possess the knowledge which should enable him to in¬ terpret these sensations and correlate them with definite changes in the organism or with functional disturbances of an organ. To remedy this it is necessary that the patient’s sensations should be as carefully studied as the details of a laboratory experiment. Now, it is well known that a physiologist can read aright the results of an experiment only if he possesses some knowledge of the functions of the organ with which he is dealing, and that the success of his experiment will depend on his being able to interpret aright the changes he detects. The most successful experimenter will be he who has the greatest knowledge, for the less experienced will fail to detect many changes, and consequently will not understand the results of his experiment. The same reasoning applies to the physician. Before he can in¬ terpret the patient’s sensations he must have a know¬ ledge of the functional disturbances that are capable of producing these sensations. We must learn to re¬ cognise that when we fail to detect a disease, in the absence of physical signs, this failure in reality proves only our own incompetence. The facts are there, but we are not sufficiently well educated to make use of the great source of information they constitute. As I have said, the sensations of the patients should be as carefully studied as the details of an experiment in a laboratory, and that not only the sensations but all the associated phenomena that may appear synchronously with them, or at a later stage, should be carefully noted and correlated. I know that physicians, generally, will protest that they have all along pursued this line of investigation and have exhausted it; therefore, to im¬ press upon you the point I am making, allow me to give you two illustrations, the first drawn from the sensations produced by abnormal action of the heart, the second from the most common of all sensations— pain.