Dr. J. Moore Neligan's practical treatise on diseases of the skin.

  • John Neligan
Date:
1866
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Dr. J. Moore Neligan's practical treatise on diseases of the skin. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    acute disease, such as fever or any of the internal in- flammations, aggravated, and the treatment rendered more difficult and complicated by its presence. Thus, although a chronic affection of the skin may not directly tend to shorten life, yet it may do so indirectly. As, however, these various points will be more fully con- sidered in speaking of each eruption individually, I shall not dwell on them at present, but proceed to describe the classification of diseases of the skin which I propose to adopt. No subject in the study of medicine has created more difficulty, or for a longer period tended to retard its advancement, than that of nosological arrangements. It was at one time believed to be impossible to understand the nature of diseases, or their proper treatment, without an intimate knowledge having been previously acquired of their classification, and we therefore find that all the writers on medicine of the last, and of the commence- ment of the present century, sedulously devoted them- selves to devise new systems, each more complicated than the other. As regards diseases generally, it is now agreed by all that the less complicated and more simple the classification under which they are arranged, for the purposes of description or of teaching, the more advantageous is it for the acquirement of a knowledge of them; and few, therefore, take the trouble of making themselves acquainted with the laboured systems of Cullen, Sauvages, Mason Good, or the many nosologists of their day. Simplicity, I need scarcely say, is of equal advantage in classifying any special set of diseases, as those of the skin; yet even in our own time it seems to me to be strangely overlooked by dermatologists; writer after writer, impelled, as it were, by an ambition to devise something novel, propounds a new classification, careless
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