Volume 1

The principles and practice of medicine / edited and completed from the manuscript of the late Charles Hilton Fagge by Philip Henry Pye-Smith.

Date:
1888
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: The principles and practice of medicine / edited and completed from the manuscript of the late Charles Hilton Fagge by Philip Henry Pye-Smith. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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

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    THE PRINCIPLES AND PRACTICE OF MEDICINE INTRODUCTOEY CHAPTER Definition of disease—Organic and fimctional diseases—Pathological anatomy and clinical characters as bases of nosology—Symptoms and diseases—Physical signs and subjective symptoms—General cetiology : exciting and predisposing causes of disease—Prognosis—Modes of dying—by paralysis of respiration— by asphyxia—by syncope—by hcemorrhage—by asthenia. Many attempts have been made to frame a satisfactory definition of disease ; but hitherto no better result has been arrived at than that it is the opposite of health, a derangement of structure or of fimction in some part of the body or in the whole of it, causing pain or discomfort, or tending to shorten Ufe.* The art of medicine, however, is concerned not with disease but with diseases. And it is of the first importance that we should form correct opinions upon what constitutes a disease, and upon what principle diseases shoidd be defined and named. _ * Both Disease and Health are incapable of precise definition because they are not scientific terms. They are descriptive, popular and subjective. Disease is discomfort. Whatever causes bodily uneasiness or whatever by expe- rience will sooner or later cause it, whatever interferes with our bodily functions, whatever tends to death, is disease. Health is the opposite condition, of comfort, ease, and ability to eat, sleep, move and perform the other functions of life. Diseases have only this in common, that they all interfere with comfort or shorten life. There is no common cause for the pains of inflammation, of colic and of mechanical injury. No line can be drawn between health and disease. Pathology is only physiology under various disturbing causes. Decay and death are as much physiological events as birth and life. All diseases imply two things—an exciting cause, qwidquid irritans, mechanical, thermal, chemical, parasitic, infective, or of unknown nature; and a reacting, living organism, quidquid irritabile. Stone in the bladder is not the disease; the disease is the reaction of the body. The severest injuries, the most violent poisons, produce no disease in a corpse. There is a tendency after disturbance to return to the previous condition, if the equili- brium has not been too violently upset. This tendency has been called Vis medicatrix Natural; but there is no such force, and the so-called efEorts of Nature often aggravate instead of curing the mischief. Our mortal bodies are not made to last for ever. It is clear that if disease is not a single state nnr the result of a single cause, it cannot be removed by any single method, or on any universal principle. Hence all Systems of Medicine, like'all Universal remedies, are of necessity false, latro-mechanical and iatro-chemical schools, Brunoniau and Antiphlogistic theories. Allo- pathy and Homoeopathy, arc all equally unreasonable; not wrong solutions of a scientific problem, but ignorant answers to an absuril question. The art of medicine, therefore, as above stated, is not concerned with disease in the abstract, but with separate diseases, with pains and discomforts, the cause, seat, and origin of which the physician seeks to find, and, if possible, to cure in each case—larpevei yAp Ka9' iKaara.—Ed. •