Clinical manual for the study of medical cases / edited by James Finlayson.

Date:
1886
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Clinical manual for the study of medical cases / edited by James Finlayson. Source: Wellcome Collection.

    24/790 page 6
    external characters of shrinking and shrivelling of the soft tissues, in the order indicated above as a general rule. But loss of weight, as a personal and individual fact, can be exactly established only by repeated weighings of the same patient at intervals ; and in hospital wards this ought to be done on admission, and afterwards every week or two, so as to obtain an accurate view of the progress of the case. In private prac- tice, among men of the well-to-do classes, it is quite common, nowadays, to find that the habitual or physiological weight of the individual, and even the amount of variation in it in the midst of apparent good health, are well enough known to patients themselves, from actual weighings more or less fre- quently repeated ; and by availing ourselves of these spontane- ously provided data we are often able to form a tolerably clear conception of the morbid changes present at the time of first seeing the patient. But in other cases no such data exist; and the personal equation, so to speak, of weight has to be adjusted for the individual from more general statements, or from actual observations founded on averages. But this is by no means easy ; for the limits of variation in weight consistent with health, even in the same individual, have yet to be deter- mined ; and the extreme limits of difference in a number of individuals of like stature are notoriously so wide, even under strictly physiological conditions, as to render all averages inapplicable to the extremes. A vast series of observations by Dr. Hutchinson has, for many years past, been commonly appealed to as affording the nearest approximation attainable to the common English standard of relative height and weight; while a corresponding American standard has been furnished in the reports of the Surgeon-General at Washington. The Greek ideal of robust manhood in the well-known statue of the (so-called) Dying Gladiator has been made the basis of a mathematical calculation, by the late Dr. William Eobertson of Edinburgh, by which the statue, reduced to the proportions of a human figure, has been rendered (as it were) into exact terms of weight corresponding with every successive inch and
    digitised image 1
    digitised image 2
    digitised image 3