Volume 1

The internal secretions and the principles of medicine / by Charles E. de M. Sajous.

  • Charles E. de M. Sajous
Date:
1912
Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

Credit: The internal secretions and the principles of medicine / by Charles E. de M. Sajous. Source: Wellcome Collection.

    15/882
    (Containing a snminary of the author’s newer conceptions up to 1907.) While tlie manuscrijit for the first volume was delivered to the publishers in 1902, the second volume was only finished in 190'i'. As the latter embodied researches carried on during the interval of five years between the two volumes, it became necessary to correct what errors the first contained in the light of these researches. This feature, coupled with the large patron- age the medical profession has granted the work, has imposed the need af new editions. That very few corrections have proven necessary, either by reason of these investigations or of wliat justified criticisms the work has received, is shown by the list of additions to our loiowledge (see page x et seq. of this preface) it introduces. The second volume may thus be said only to amplify the newer functions I pointed out in the first volume in 1902 and to illustrate their importance in practice. The present status of Medicine precludes any apology for the publication of a work such as this. Professor Sollmann, a prominent member of the Council of Pharmacy of the Amer- ican ]\fedical Association, wrote, only recently (1908) : “A generation ago therapeutics was an art, promising to develop into a science. At present it cannot be classed as an art, nor as a science; it can only be classed as a confusion.” Indeed, Osier’s public declaration^ that of the action of drugs “we knew little” though we “put them into bodies the action of which we know less,” sustained by Llewellys F. Barker’s estimate pub- lished about the same time,- “that drugs of unhnoivn physio- logical action cannot conscientiously be set to act upon bodily tissue in disease in which we are ignorant of deviations from the nornialf’ involves the conclusion that our ignorance applies to disease as well as to therapeutics—in a word, to all that which endows us with the right to accept, with any degree of self- respect, the confidence which suffering humanity places in us. It is not my purpose to take issue with these frank ex- 1 Osier: N. Y. Sun. Jan. 27, 1901. -Llewellys F. Barker: Bull. Johns Hopkins Hosp., July-Aug., 1900.