A treatise on the theory and practice of medicine / by John Syer Bristowe.

  • John Syer Bristowe
Date:
1887
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: A treatise on the theory and practice of medicine / by John Syer Bristowe. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    cases. This course has been forced upon me by the necessity under which I laboured of compressing my work within the narrowest possible limits of space. But it is a course which I adopted reluc- tantly, and with the full knowledge that I was thereby robbing my pages of much that might have been instructive, of much at any rate that would have rendered them pleasanter reading. Everyone who has perused them knows how much of the charm, the freshness, the vigour, the impressiveness, and the permanent interest, that charac- terise the classical writings of Abercrombie, of Graves, of Watson, of Trousseau, and of other masters of our art, depend upon the well-told cases with which they are so richly interspersed. I have already referred to the omission to quote authorities of which I have been generally guilty. The excuses which I have to offer in reference to this matter are mainly the following:—I was anxious to economise space; I felt, moreover, that my work was not an encyclopaedia, still less a history of medicine; and again, many important additions which have been made to our knowledge, even during the last few years, have already become classical, and form an integral part of the great body of Medical Science. My indebted- ness, however, direct or indirect, to innumerable writers and workers I must fully acknowledge; and among these I must not fail to in- clude my senior colleagues and former teachers of St. Thomas's Hospital, the value of whose teaching to myself I cannot exaggerate. But there are certain works on which I have drawn very largely, and to the authors of which on that account I owe special gratitude: these are, in pathology and morbid anatomy, Eokitansky's ' Patho- logical Anatomy,' Cornil and Kanvier's * Manual of Pathological Histology,' and Virchow's writings, including above all his mar- vellous work on the ' Pathology of Tumours;' in general medicine. Sir T. Watson's 'Lectures on the Principles and Practice of Physic,' Eeynolds's ' System of Medicine,' Aitken's ' Science and Practice of Medicine,' Niemeyer's 'Elements of Internal Pathology and Therapeutics,' and Trousseau's ' Clinical Medicine'; and in special subjects, Duchenne's admirable work on ' Localised Electrisation,' and the no less admirable Lectures by Charcot on the ' Diseases of the Nervous System.'