Volume 1

Diseases of the arteries including angina pectoris / by Clifford Allbutt.

  • Thomas Clifford Allbutt
Date:
1915
Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

Credit: Diseases of the arteries including angina pectoris / by Clifford Allbutt. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    and paper classifications, these rhetoricians were ready to explain anything. As Vaquez says, by such tickets our ignorance is concealed. At the outset then, as we shall see, these elaborate subdivisions of arteriosclerosis were vitiated by merging things essentially alien in one and the same category ; e.g. the arteriosclerosis of moderate pressures with that of hyperpiesis; the one primary as regards the arteries, the other secondary. For my part, perhaps, in this essay I have receded into the opposite extreme, into an extreme distrust of categories; from my own point of view, or indeed under all points of view, perhaps I ought to have divided these several processes the one from the other ; but I feel the time has not yet come for radical separations, or much system-building. In manuscript I tried logical schemes more than once, but they led to repetitions, qualifications, and the loss of many a current point of contrast. There is yet too much haze on the horizons ; truth is in the making, ideas are in movement; we may envy but we cannot yet enjoy the certainties of the theologian; our facts are still divided and scattered, they cannot yet be packed into their universals ; they lack attraction therefore, their group¬ ing is loose. As Leo X. put it, when compared with doctrines digested into order and formula, and built into a logical taber¬ nacle, “ vagi et ancipites videantur.” With its Latin tradition, theology can provide completeness for its pupils ; the pathologist cannot be pontifical, or not for a long time to come. He is embarrassed by “ Fillogique du vrai.” Much then depends upon the 'precise use of words and names, a matter on which I have often dwelt in other papers; for herein medical authors are really reckless. What are we to think of a clever and eminent colleague who told us the other day that “ migraine, epilepsy and asthma are the same disease ” ! as though one were to say that Mr. A., his grandfather and his cousin were the same person ! In respect of our present subject I am disposed to adopt the name atherosclerosis, in place of arteriosclerosis, at any rate so far as to indicate the ordinary degenerative lesion of arteries. I admit, lest I should mislead the reader, that I have been rather deliberately inconsistent in this usage ; I have used “atherosclerosis” in certain - passages where I wished to avail myself of the specific value of the newer name, but otherwise I
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