Lecture, introductory to a course of clinical medicine, delivered in the theatre of Queen's College, Birmingham, on Tuesday, December the first, 1846 / by Samuel Wright.

  • Wright, Samuel
Date:
1847
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Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Lecture, introductory to a course of clinical medicine, delivered in the theatre of Queen's College, Birmingham, on Tuesday, December the first, 1846 / by Samuel Wright. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by The University of Glasgow Library. The original may be consulted at The University of Glasgow Library.

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    that, without them, your practice at best can be only blind empiricism. They are as necessary to a correct diagnosis and treatment of disease, as is a knowledge of the funda- mental properties of matter, to a comprehension of obscure physical phenomena. Those of you who are not well ac- quainted with the elemental subjects I have specified, will listen to the discourses of your clinical Professors with very little advantage. It being admitted, then, that you are prepared for instruc- tion in clinical medicine, we have next to consider in what this instruction consists. Your lectures on the theory and practice of physic, have already familiarised you, verbally, with the signs, symptoms, pathology, diagnosis, and treat- ment, of disease. The business of yom* clinical teachers is to show you these things in their living detail. It is, in fact, a system of pointing out, and explaining, morbid phe- nomena, and the action of medicines, as these are mani- fested in the different cases that occur in hospital practice. To this end, it is necessary that your attention should be chiefly directed to the minutice of disease. It is seldom, at the bedside, that you recognise any striking pathological features unconnected with others, )ess conspicuous in them- selves, but still most important in their tendencies. An abstract morbid phenomenon, would be a prodigy in patho- logy. They are the little things, or the items of ailment, constituting the sum of it, that you are required to recognise, singly and in conjunction, in order to form a correct diag- nosis, and to authorise a correct line of treatment. By how much the more you regard these things in then- proper light, by so much the more will you be able to relieve or to remedy disease. This is the great ground of distinction between a judicious and an ignorant practitioner—between a good clinical teacher and a bad one. The little things I speak of, it is our business to instiuct
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