Medical lectures and essays / by George Johnson.

  • George Johnson
Date:
1887
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Medical lectures and essays / by George Johnson. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by King’s College London. The original may be consulted at King’s College London.

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    !•] As the astronomers, relying upon the constancy of the laws of gravitation and of planetary motion, have discovered a pre- viously unknown planet by observing the perturbed orbit of one before known; as the biologists, in reliance upon the constancy of organic types, have been enabled, from a fragment of a skeleton, or from a tooth, to reconstruct the whole frame- work of an extinct reptile, bird or mammal, so the pathologist and the practising physician, familiar with the laws of phy- siology, which, although modified, are not suspended by disease, have learnt that a disease commencing in one organ may involve, as a necessary consequence, widespread structural changes in other parts. For a man ignorant of general pathology to claim to have special knowledge and skill in the treatment of some particular class of diseases would be as baseless an assumption as that of a would-be astronomer who, while ignorant of the elementary fact that the sun is the centre of our planetary system, pre- tended to have acquired a special knowledge of the orbit and phases of the moon, and the flux and reflux of the tides. Such a pretender would be rightly looked upon as the type and embodiment of lunacy. It should be clearly understood that the main reason and justification for certain forms of specialism consist in the convenience, and even the need, of a division of labour, and not in the possibility of separating the body into different parts, and then making one of them the exclusive object of study and practice. The second object which I have had in view, has been to insist upon the value of all physical means of diagnosis, and especially of two of the most recently introduced, the ophthal- moscope and the laryngoscope. No student, whatever his future line of practice may be, can be considered to have com- pleted his medical training until he has learnt to use these simple but invaluable instruments, which have, in a very real and literal sense, shed an entirely new light upon a large and important class of diseases, and by the aid of which our know- ledge of many facts tending to establish the correlation and interdependence of pathological conditions has been greatly extended.
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