How to feel the pulse and what to feel in it : practical hints for beginners / by William Ewart.

  • Ewart, William, 1848-1929.
Date:
1892
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: How to feel the pulse and what to feel in it : practical hints for beginners / by William Ewart. 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.

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    HOW TO FEEL THE PULSE AXD WHAT TO FEEL IX IT. INTRODUCTORY. The vast importance of the various features of the pulse was guessed by physicians long before the dis- covery of the circulation, but it has only been fully demonstrated within the memory of living men. It would be unfair to suppose that all the labour which was devoted to the pulse by our early predecessors in their numerous treatises (Galen alone wrote seven) had been wasted and barren in practical results, but the amount of definite information to be extracted from them is remarkably small and buried in a mass of extravagant assumption. All empty surmises have now been cleared away, and the clinical uses of the pulse narrowed down to substantial facts connected with it, which might be recorded in a few pages. But the value of these clinical facts, few as they may be, is in advance of anything dreamt of before, and is the result of vastly improved anatomical and pathological knowledge. It is already capable of demonstration by the instrumental methods of physiology, and we are rapidly approaching a stage when some of the qualities of the pulse will find a mathematical expression. A