Two lectures ... : being introductory addresses delivered in the University of Glasgow, and in the Western Infirmary, session 1877-78 / by W.T. Gairdner, Professor of Practice of Medicine in the University of Glasgow.
- William Tennant Gairdner
- Date:
- 1877
Licence: Public Domain Mark
Credit: Two lectures ... : being introductory addresses delivered in the University of Glasgow, and in the Western Infirmary, session 1877-78 / by W.T. Gairdner, Professor of Practice of Medicine in the University of Glasgow. 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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![Fatal Habits. culty in realising true clinical instruction of the best kind, as a rule, otherwise than in hospital wards. Young practitioners arc too inexperienced, old practitioners are too busy, to give it in a really profitable manner, from the ever-increasing and over-abounding stores of general and miscellaneous practice. While the grass grows, the steed starves; while the multi- tude of cases is being thus over-hastily seen, the mind of the ])upil, far from being enriched therel)y with really valuable experience, is sterilised, so to speak, by acquiring the fatal liabit of passing diseases under review superficially, and with- out anything like due investigation; so that he becomes, in the end, like the veriest empiric, a mere man of routine ; with this difference, and one not always in his favour, that he has been during his pupilage artificially fed and nursed, so to speak, on books and lectures, and finally exalted, by the possession of a degree or diploma, into the conceit of himself that he is com- petent to know and to treat all manner of diseases—the fact being that he has not learned even the ver}^ elements of a true diagnosis. 2. Clinical instruction, then, is, as we have said, bedside in- struction ; but it is, or ought to be, such bedside instruction only as is methodically conducted, and rendered, as nearly as may be, complete. And, if you will think of it for a moment, the method of the instruction is to you quite as important as even the facts, or substance of the instruction. For it is but little profitable to you to see a patient lying in a bed, and to hear me pronounce it a case of pneumonia, or of Bright's disease; what is wanted is that you should be able to see why and how this conclusion is arrived at. And in the order of importance to you, the how is first, the why second; because the per- sonal realisation of the facts, the investigation of the pheno- mena, to speak in scientific phrase, should precede, and not suc- ceed, the formation of an opinion about them. Hence it is scarcely clinical instruction at all, in the proper and just mean- ing of the word, for a physician merely to lecture about a case, and to tell you in detail his opinion about it. What is really wanted is that he should place you, or at least some of you,](https://iiif.wellcomecollection.org/image/b21464352_0024.jp2/full/800%2C/0/default.jpg)
