A brief essay on the peculiar advantages of the flexible metallic bougies, in the treatment of strictures in the urethra, and the evacuation of the urinary bladder / by W. Smyth.

  • Smyth, William.
Date:
1804
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: A brief essay on the peculiar advantages of the flexible metallic bougies, in the treatment of strictures in the urethra, and the evacuation of the urinary bladder / by W. Smyth. 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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    disdaining to employ their ingenuity in the fa- brication of theoretical opinions, have founded their notions on observations of the morbid parts themselves in subjects who have died whilst la- bouring under this complaint. Arguments built upon such principles are incontrovertible; they furnish us with powerful facts, and shew clearly the different states men may be in who are thus affected, and enable us to account for one man’s being subject to this malady for a number of years, and suffering only slight inconvenience; whilst another afflicted with the same complaint drags on a miserable existence, although affected but a short space of time. These differences in different patients may easily be accounted for, particularly when we consider the nature of the disease, and the part affected. Patients can for themselves form a very just idea respecting their own complaints, and must see the strongest necessity for medical advice at the earliest period possible after the commence- ment of the disease, and by this means they will escape much of the torture and danger to which they must otherwise be exposed. They cannot, as in many other cases, frame any excuse even to themselves for delay ; they cannot have -the most distant idea that the complaint will be meliorated, much less disappear, by procrastination; but, on the contrary, that it must, from day to day, grow worse.