Clinical lectures on diseases of the nervous system : delivered at the National Hospital for the Paralysed and Epileptic, London / by W.R. Gowers.

  • William Richard Gowers
Date:
1895
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Clinical lectures on diseases of the nervous system : delivered at the National Hospital for the Paralysed and Epileptic, London / by W.R. Gowers. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by The University of Leeds Library. The original may be consulted at The University of Leeds Library.

    15/288 page 11
    has gained a fragmentary knowledge that has served only to mislead him. Those, on the other hand, who have learned the subject as we have it now, cannot realise the change, for they have but one of the terms needed for the comparison; while the large number of practitioners who studied medicine during the period in which the change was taking place, learned a litde of the new and a good deal of the old, and acquired a mixture containing many incompatibles, with the common consequence that may be described in terms of metaphor, not inexact, as mental turbidity. To clear your minds and get rid, as far as may be, of all that prevents a clear vision of disease, to learn how most usefully to see disease through the clearer media, and, above all, to see it in such a way as shall enable you to treat it with such advantage as is attainable—these, I con- ceive, are the objects that bring together here the members of this post-graduate course. But I am not sure that the students of to-day, or at least many of them, who have acquired the latest and fullest knowledge of these diseases, have learned, in equal measure, how to use their knowl- edge, or are free from the need of that training in method which the practitioner feels so keenly. The reason for this, or at least the conditions that make it probable, you will perceive when I tell you the nature of the difficulty that is experienced and the character of the need that is felt. Let me, however, first give you an illustration of the change that has come over our knowledge of diseases of the nervous system during the last quarter of a century. I remember, twenty-five years ago, listening to a lecture on chronic spinal meningitis, given by one of the most competent teachers of the day, which presented the latest and clearest opinions on the subject. The malady, as described in that lecture, had no existence. In the case on which it was given, the membranes of the spinal cord were
    digitised image 1
    digitised image 2
    digitised image 3