Address in medicine : on some of the relations of catarrhal affections / by William Pepper.

  • William Pepper
Date:
1881
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Address in medicine : on some of the relations of catarrhal affections / by William Pepper. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by The Royal College of Surgeons of England. The original may be consulted at The Royal College of Surgeons of England.

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    I have fount] it difficult to comply with the rule providing that the chairmen of the several Sections shall read addresses on the advances and discoveries of the past year in the branches of science included in their respective Sections. The past year, as regards the progress of practical medicine, has been marked, so far as I know, not so much by the announcement of new and important truths as by the accumulation of a vast number of carefully observed facts and of original investigations. These have already been presented to the medical world in the most accessible form in the various abstracts of medical science, and to summarize and reproduce them here would bean undertaking scarcely worthy of the audience I have the honor to address. It has seemed to me, therefore, that it might not be inappro- priate to offer a few practical remarks on some one of the medi- cal topics that have occupied most attention of late. It may be safely stated that for some years the largest share of study has been devoted to those great general morbid processes which are grouped under the class of specific fevers or zymotic diseases. This is not astonishing. The wide prevalence and fatal charac- ter of some of these affections demand incessant efforts to detect and remove their causes, to limit their spread, and to modify their course. The enthusiastic zeal with which the study of all sub- jects pertaining to public health has been taken up of late years, and the hopes that are entertained widely, and probably with increasing justification, that this study will lead to a material decrease in the prevalence and fatality of these diseases, fully account for the extent to which the minds of medical men are occupied with the subjects of infection, contagion, zymosis, and the like. The theories upon these subjects have a fascinating interest, the methods of treatment based upon them are often ingenious and plausible, and it is most agreeable to have the *
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