Address in pathology : on the autonomous life of the specific infections / by Charles Creighton.

  • Creighton, Charles, 1847-1927.
Date:
1883
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Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Address in pathology : on the autonomous life of the specific infections / by Charles Creighton. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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

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    [Reprinted for the Author from the British Medical Journal, Aug. 4th, 1883 ] ADDRESS IN PATHOLOGY. BY CIIAKLES CJREIGHTON, M.D. ON THE AUTONOMOUS LIFE OF THE SPECIFIC INFECTIONS. Mr. President and Gentlemen,—I have unusually good reasons for prefacing my address with an apology. I cannot claim to speak from the fulness of experience, which has given so much value and distinction to the addresses that have been delivered before the Association ; and I have a subject assigned to me which demands experience and a mature judgment in no ordinary degree. Pathology is a growing science, its aspects are constantly changing, a single year’s work brings us a multitude of new and often puzzling facts; and although the issues are of the most momentous kind, not even the wisest and most judicial minds in the profession can alway? see their way to a clear and definite opinion. But, amidst all this uncertainty, there is one central and guiding principle in the doctrine of disease which we may hold fast to. It is the physiological principle, or the idea that diseased states of the body are but modifications of healthy states, deviations from the beacen track, perturbations of the normal life, shortcomings of the physiological standard. Thus, even in so formidable a malady as diabetes, we are still within sight of the line of health ; there may be a physiological glycosuria; and that fact, as Dr. Bence Jones says, proves to us that the disease is only a little way distant from health. “Here as elsewhere,” says that eminent chemist and pathologist, “ there is no definite limit where health ends and disease begins.” To find the proper physiological analo- gies for diseased processes is the task of modern pathology ; and I do not think that there is, in the whole range of science, any better kind of intellectual exercise than to expose the working of the ordinary laws of structure and function under the mask of disease. The physiological idea is, indeed, the hope and inspiration of patho- logical science, as it is also of medical practice. But there is no rea- son why I should attempt to say again what has so often been well said before. Members of the Association who heard Professor Michael Foster, at the Cambridge meeting, discourse on the “ Rela- tions of Physiology to Pathology,” will not have forgotten how he proved that the difference between these two sciences was merely a superficial difference, whether as regarded method or subject- matter. We shall, most of us, also recall Professor Huxley’s lucid exposition before the International Medical Congress, of the “ Con- nection of the Biological Sciences with Medicine,” wherein he showed that pathology was that branch of biology which concerned itself with perturbations of the normal life. That view of pathology is one that we all share; and as I have endeavoured, according to my opportunities, to work out physio- logical analogies of disease in particular instances, I shall not be suspected of any want of sympathy with the general principle. But I am none the less confronted with the difficulty that a great deal of pathology appears to be quite different in kind from any physi- ology known to us. What are the physiological analogies of the lnrective and constitutional disedses, and how large a part of path- ology do the diseases of that class stand for ?