An essay on clinical instruction ... / Translated by Peter Martin.

  • Pierre Charles Alexandre Louis
Date:
1834
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Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: An essay on clinical instruction ... / Translated by Peter Martin. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    found alteration of Peyer’s glands ? Evidently tliese facts would be unknown to us. We might certainly, without the assistance of this sci¬ ence, and by the aid of the symptoms alone, determine the seat of a great number of maladies, but of their nature we should remain ignorant. The symptoms of apoplexy indicate sufficiently that the brain is the seat of this affec¬ tion, it is the same with the symptoms of softening of this organ; but how, without the aid of pathological ana¬ tomy, could we know that the former are caused by a haemorrhage, the latter by a softening or inflammation of the brain. But as the history of symptoms becomes valueless unless they have been noted with great care, from their commencement to their termination; unless all the functions have been interrogated in the same manner: so pathological anatomy can only render to science all the service which might be expected from it, when we proceed with extreme care to an examination of all the organs, in those cases which have proved fatal. The object of pathological anatomy, in fact, is not merely to point out the seat of diseases, to show their nature, to verify or unravel their complications; it is the only means of arriving at the knowledge of a great number of the laws of the economy of disease which are the most important: and this knowledge can only be the result of an equally at¬ tentive examination of all the organs, in those cases where the patient has sunk under his disease, whatever it may have been. If, for example, we know at this day that after the age of fifteen years, whenever we find tubercles or grey semi¬ transparent granulations in any organ, they coexist at the same time, and in a still more advanced stage, in the lungs, it is to pathological anatomy, cultivated as I have just said, that we owe this fact. For if we had contented ourselves with examining in most cases the organs primitively and principally affected, evidently we could not have arrived at
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