The indigestions, or, Diseases of the digestive organs functionally treated / by Thomas King Chambers.

Date:
1867
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: The indigestions, or, Diseases of the digestive organs functionally treated / by Thomas King Chambers. 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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    altogether. Again, unless an immediate note be made, the new and the strange in the day's experiences are stamped in the mind deeper than the common place, and so they are apt to take up more than their fair share of room in the diary. While personal friendship, the social standing of the patient, and other considerations will sometimes blot out, sometimes unduly brighten our recollections of the case. To these brethren in art then, as well as to others more empha- tically who have hitherto failed to put by any written record at all of their acquired knowledge, I earnestly commend the method. Independently of the advantage to patients of being able to cast back to their antecedents, whenever you see them again at whatever interval, the selfish (not perhaps wholly selfish) satisfaction of living over again at will any portion of your professional life, is worth tenfold the trouble it gives. Its value to the public is directly proportioned to the value of the individual himself to the public; his experience is a simple fraction of himself. I cannot expect the reading of my notes to be as agreeable to others as it is to me. Still the gracious way in which even rough clinical sketches are received in the shape of lectures, makes me hope that these studies, being of a quasi-clinical nature, may have some of the same favour shown them. A still higher reward would be that my witness to the pleasantness of the task should lead others, richer dowered than I am, to unbarn the harvest of their experience in its own living form, instead of merely the distilled essence of it in their opinions. T. K. C. 22b, Bkook Street, Grosvenok Square ; December, 1866. ^ „_ _ f~j