The modern advancement of practical medicine and surgery : an inaugural address to the Medico-Chirurgical Society of Edinburgh / by James Y. Simpson.

  • James Young Simpson
Date:
[1853]
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: The modern advancement of practical medicine and surgery : an inaugural address to the Medico-Chirurgical Society of Edinburgh / by James Y. Simpson. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    of the nature of some diseases* by showing us5 for example, that acute hydrocepha¬ lus, which was formerly supposed to be an instance of pure dropsy, is generally the result of inflammatory and acute tubercular disease; that the old nosological dropsies of the chest are almost all instances of disease of the heart; that the so- called fungus of the testicle is an inflammatory and curable, and not a malignant and incurable malady; that the gangrena senilis is a result of arterial inflamma¬ tion and obstruction, and not of weakness, etc. Pathological anatomy has further been of vast use negatively, by demonstrat¬ ing to physicians that some affections that were formerly deemed inflammatory or organic are not so. How many lives has it saved, by proving that delirium tremens is not to be confounded, as it was at the commencement of the present century, with inflammation of the brain, and not to be treated on the principles of encephalic inflammation. It has already saved not a few limbs by showing, that in hysterical subjects there may occur affections simulating true disease of the synovial membrane of the joints, without any such disease being present ; and it has taught us that many cases of local pain,—as in the irritable mamma or testicle, etc.—are cases not of local inflammation or organic derangement, but of local neuralgia. These discoveries in pathological anatomy have been revealed by means of the scalpel. But it has latterly acquired other means to aid it in its researches, especially the microscope. Histological Anatomy is of too late origin,—-as applied at least to the inves¬ tigation of morbid structures and effusions,—to allow the medical profession to judge definitely of the actual extent of usefulness that will be ultimately derived from the prosecution of it. But it has already by itself effected various interest¬ ing discoveries in relation to disease. It has, for example, revealed to us one or two affections, the very existence of which was previously unknown, as leucocy- themia and sarcina ventriculi. It has disclosed to us the true nature of some diseases, and entirely changed and corrected our notions in respect to them; as by proving the actual cryptogamic structure of various eruptions upon the cutaneous and mucous surfaces of the body. Further, the microscope enables the pathologist to distinguish and determine, with additional accuracy, inflamma¬ tory products in the brain and other diseased parts, when their presence might be otherwise a matter of doubt. It affords us also a new element for ascertaining the malignant character of some tumours and discharges. And above all, it has eminently cleared up, and enlarged our knowledge of the nature, as well as of the diagnosis, of the different morbid states of the urine. Pathological Chemistry forms another department in which medicine has advanced much within the last half century, and in which it is, I believe, yet destined to advance perhaps infinitely more than in any other. Within the last fev years organic chemistry has made enormous steps ; but they are still too evi¬ dently the unsteady, tottering steps of a young giant. And a herculean amount of work and research remains, ere we can hope to attain all that we may confidently expect to derive in theoretical and practical medicine from the advances of patho-
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