The diagnosis of nervous and mental diseases / by Howell T. Pershing.

  • Pershing, Howell Terry.
Date:
1901
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: The diagnosis of nervous and mental diseases / by Howell T. Pershing. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by the Augustus C. Long Health Sciences Library at Columbia University and Columbia University Libraries/Information Services, through the Medical Heritage Library. The original may be consulted at the the Augustus C. Long Health Sciences Library at Columbia University and Columbia University.

    9/248
    PREFACE. The object of this book is to facilitate the recognition of nervous and mental diseases by physicians who are not specialists in neurology. It makes no attempt to add to the facts of medicine but aims simply to set forth a practi- cal method of diagnosis in as convenient and compact a form as possible. Neurological diagnosis presents peculiar difficulties for those who have not been specially trained in it. A thorough examination must be followed by a complicated train of reasoning in which there are many possibilities of error. To avoid the difficulties by leaving them all to the neurologist is impracticable, for cases of nervous disease, often simulating other maladies, are sure to come to every one who practices medicine, even to the specialist who has least to do with neurology. In trying to teach an available method of diagnosis, med- ical writers may well adopt a plan extensively used in other sciences. The student of botany does not have to carry in mind the characters of all the species he may possibly meet in order to find the name and classification of any speci- men in which he may be interested. He is provided with a table, or key, in which there is a condensed description of all the classes, orders, genera and species, so arranged that, having made a proper examination of the specimen, he can rapidly find the divisions and subdivisions to which it belongs. The same method is used with great advan- tage in zoology, chemistry and mineralogy. Of all the branches of medicine, neurology is the one to which it is most applicable.