General pathology, as conducive to the establishment of rational principles for the diagnosis and treatment of disease : a course of lectures, delivered at St. Thomas's Hospital, during the summer session of 1850 / by John Simon.

  • Simon, John, Sir, 1816-1904.
Date:
1852
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: General pathology, as conducive to the establishment of rational principles for the diagnosis and treatment of disease : a course of lectures, delivered at St. Thomas's Hospital, during the summer session of 1850 / by John Simon. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by the National Library of Medicine (U.S.), through the Medical Heritage Library. The original may be consulted at the National Library of Medicine (U.S.)

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    successful in proportion as it is based on Pathology;—undoubtedly you will save more lives, and relieve more suffering, by striving diligently and constantly to establish your principles of treatment on this scientific foundation. For the primary forms of disease—forms to be encountered and conquered by the action of direct specific antidotes, I may confess that as yet Pathology has done little. In discoveries of this nature, the empiricism of six thousand years has achieved more than the new science, which even now is but in its infancy; but, if accident has revealed, and if experience has confirmed for us, a knowledge of the properties of quinine, of mercury, of colchicum, of antimony, I can- not doubt that even these great results of popular observation will be transcended and eclipsed by the positive results of rational patho- logy;—that cancer, gout, and scrofula will presently yield to philo- sophical investigation what they have refused to blundering quackery; and that, within the lifetime of many here, there will be a specific treatment of each diathesis, founded on an exact knowledge of the physiological laws of its manifestation. But, from this, which Pathology may do and will do, I turn to what it has done. Think, gentlemen, of the immense negative re- sults which it daily achieves—of the vast amount of injurious treat- ment which has given way, and daily is giving way, under its auspi- ces. You, who are at all familiar with the history of practical medi- cine, look back a score of years: think of the treatment of fever, of erysipelas ; think how many died of venesection, how many of mer- cury ; think of the division of nerves for central neuralgia; think of the treatment of syphilis ; of the confusion of inflammation with atrophy of the brain; of the bleeding and opium in tetanus ; of the inflamed kidneys irreparably damaged by diuretics; think of the treatment of heart-diseases, and of the extreme zeal with which the Physician strove against the curative tendency of Nature; think how one man's whole materia medica was blue-pill and black-dose ; while another practitioner would hide his want of a definite object by accumulating, in a single prescription, half the heavy titles of the pharmacopoeia; and, not least among the services which Pathology has rendered to mankind, observe the incalculable good it has done, with regard to very many humoral disorders and local derangements of nutrition, in going beyond the notion of a peccant humour as something to be purged out, and in pointing to the constitutional conditions of anaemia and depression, in which such errors of assimi- lation so generally arise. In all these respects, where Pathology has been the reforming and rationalizing principle of medicine, the advantages derived from it have been immense, as counteracting mischievous practice, and as teaching us to refrain from doing harm; and I contend that the science of pathology would do more good, would save more lives, than all the vaunted specifics of empirical medicine, if only by that humble precept which it constantly impresses on the student—to be content with doing nothing when ignorant how to do good. Thus far I have alluded only to the utilities of the science—only