On the pathology and treatment of valvular disease of the heart and its secondary affections : being the Gulstonian lectures, delivered at the Royal College of Physicians in February 1851 / by Edward Latham Ormerod.

  • Ormerod, Edward Latham, 1819-1873.
Date:
1851
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Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: On the pathology and treatment of valvular disease of the heart and its secondary affections : being the Gulstonian lectures, delivered at the Royal College of Physicians in February 1851 / by Edward Latham Ormerod. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by The Royal College of Surgeons of England. The original may be consulted at The Royal College of Surgeons of England.

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    LECTURE L—Part T. Diseases of the Heart—difficulties of the subject—scope of the present Lectures —Andrafs survey of our knowledge of diseases of the Heart twenty-five years affo—deficiencies noted then—how far supplied now—division of the subject. [t would be hard, Sir, to find an entirely new subject fitted for the present occasion. For ;hat could scarcely be of sufficient impor- ;ance which had wholly escaped the atten- ;ion of the many talented and industrious )bserver3 who are now engaged in the study of pathology in all its branches. I nay seem to have run into the contrary jrror by choosing a subject so trite as Dis- 3ases of the Heart. But you cannot have brgotten what fresh Ught and interest Dr. Budd threw on abscess of the liver, and Dr. Baly on dysentery, from this place, on (imilar occasions, in their masterly reviews )f these subjects as they had come respec- ;ively under their observation. May I shelter myself imder their example, in tiding to follow, at a humble distance, in ;he same manner, on a different track ? Apart from its own difficulties I cannot 3ut feel that I have undertaken a very deh- :&te task in addressuig you from this place )n diseases of the heart. Our accurate inowledge of the matter, indeed, is of no great age ; yet its litei-ature is very exten- sive, and still we are not arrived at that Deriod that we may adopt the conclusions which have been deduced, and forget that ihey have ever been the subject of contro- versy, or that our gratitude is due to more than one independent obseiwer for substan- tiating single points. I cannot tliink that I have not erred, on occasion, when re- Ferruig to such points, by defective or inac- curate acknowledgments of the sources of our information concerning them ; but I lave erred in ignorance, vmintentionaUy. Besides the systematic works to wliich 3ne natm-ally looks for information, there 3 another class of writings, towards which, rom their very numbers, such errors of omission of reference are more excusable. There are masses of valuable cases and essays buried in the volumes of our own and the foreign periodical literature, which it ifl ahnost impossible, out of London, to consiilt and reduce within the limits which the present purpose assigns. The pleasure of having accidentally met with such, of no inconsiderable merit, now and then, has been marred by the thought of how many more there may be to which no such lucky accident has led. But I should- be defeating the objfeot which I had proposed to myself were I to attempt to condense-here all the hterature and statistics of a subject whose every axiom, perhaps, has been as . warmly as- serted as denied. And it would be imne- cessary; for Dr. Clendinning (Croonian Lectures, Med. Gaz., 1838, p. 442) has supphed the statistics, and Dr. Bellingham (Lectures on Diseases of the Heart, Med. Gaz., 1850) has laid me imder great obli- gations for references to the origmal papers in which the discoveries on this subject were made known. I would refer to their more comprehensive lectures for tliis infor- mation. At the risk of incurring the charge of aSected humdity, I must add one remark. The observation of nature is open to all: Nature denies her instructions to none who desire to become her pupils ; and with such opportmiities as the wards and dead- hoiise of St. Bartholomew's Hospital sup- phed for testing the accuracy of the de- scriptions or explanations given by authors, and for comparing their discrepant conclu- sions with the result of fresh observation, it was scarcely possible not to form an opi- nion of one's own on the disputed points : the more so, as often occiu-ruig in the form of questions from uitelhgent students : and this with every assistance, which I take this opportimity of acknowledging, from friends and students in collecting obscure cases, and from Dr. Latham and Dr. Bur- rows in clearing up these obscurities. I could only wish that the results had borne a larger proportion to the opportunities. With the most sincere desire to elicit the truth, it has been my chief pleasure to draw from fresh observations results agreeing with those which have satisfied the minds of the more esteemed inquu*ers into those par- ticular points. I could desire no more, in seeking the truth, independently as far as miglit be, than to have their testimony thati hadattained it. But,incommunicatingthese results, I feel on how much surer groimds they have known, and how much better they have expressed, wliat I have laboured to ascertam. It may be thus with all who, devotmg themselves to any subject, acquire a feeUng of veneration for the very words of the great masters of tliat particular sci-