Queen's College, Cork, Faculty of Medicine, session 1850-51. Introductory address on medical education, with especial reference to the course of study required for the degree of M.D. : in the Queens's University, Ireland / by Alexander Fleming.

Date:
1850
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Queen's College, Cork, Faculty of Medicine, session 1850-51. Introductory address on medical education, with especial reference to the course of study required for the degree of M.D. : in the Queens's University, Ireland / by Alexander Fleming. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh. The original may be consulted at the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh.

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    take a very familiar example, and suppose that you wish to know the appearance of a man, so as to be able to identify him again with certainty, you would not read a description of his face, or content yourself with a sight of his portrait, but you would take the first opportunity of seeing the individual, and observing for yourself his features; and the same plan must be followed in the study of all the medical sciences. But it is in obtaining a knowledge of the symptoms and signs of disease that practical education is most indispensable. It is then called clinical medicine, and is, or ought to be, taught at the bed-side of the patient. Those of my hearers who have advanced to this, the most interesting of all their courses of in- struction, must be aware that the only means of knowing the jerking pulse of aortic disease, the crepitating rale of a pneu- monia, or the bronchophony of a tubercular lung, is to have them pointed out by your teacher, that you may feel them and listen to them for yourselves. Description is here utterly inadequate to supply the place of observation. Or, again, how impossible to obtain a knowledge of diseases of the skin from books, and yet how easily the student recognises an acne, a psoriasis, or a prurigo, when once they have been shown to him on the living body. No diseases are so readily known as these, yet in this country their diagnosis is commonly thought to be dif- ficult, simply because they are not taught in the hospital. Your knowledge of the properties of drugs may be complete, and yet utterly fruitless, if to it is not superadded an acquaintance with their action on the economy, and of the modifying influences of constitution and disease, as ascertained by cautious observa- tion at the bed-side. In clinical medicine, it is desirable that the pupil in the first instance have a teacher in whom ho has full confidence, to tell him the name and nature of the pulse he feels, the sounds he hears, and the appearances he sees: and here the evil of an incompetent instructor is most serious, as erroneous impressions of sense, once acquired, arc difficult to
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