Hooper's physician's vade mecum, or, A manual of the principles and practice of physic.

  • Robert Hooper
Date:
1854
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Hooper's physician's vade mecum, or, A manual of the principles and practice of physic. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by the Francis A. Countway Library of Medicine, through the Medical Heritage Library. The original may be consulted at the Francis A. Countway Library of Medicine, Harvard Medical School.

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    INTRODUCTION This book is intended to be, in the widest and truest sense of the term, a practical work ; that is to say, it aims at bringing toge- ther, in a small compass, and in a form easy of reference, those items of information which the practitioner would desire to possess when he stands at the bedside, or when he studies an individual case with a view to its treatment. The first and most obvious requisite for a practitioner is the faci- lity of recognizing a disease when he sees it, of distinguishing it from others which resemble it, and of foretelling its probable course and termination. The treatment which he adopts will be judicious in pro- portion to the readiness with which he recognises, and the accuracy with which he discriminates the disease ; and will be either ]-ational or empirical, according as he does or does not understand its real nature and true cause. Bat a facility of recognizing and discriminating diseases, a knowledge of their nature and causes, of their ordinary course and termination, and of their appropriate treatment, though essential to sound and successful practice, are not the only qualifications for it. There is a vast amount of information of a truly practical character, which does not find a place in formal descriptions of individual dis- eases, though comprising all these particulars. Such descriptions must be regarded either as condensed histories of the more perfect forms of disease, or as abstracts of the leading features observed in the ordinaiy run of cases, with an occasional notice of the more remark- able exceptions to the rule ; but age, sex, and original and acquired peculiarity of constitution, give rise to differences in health, or habitual departures from it, which, in a remarkable manner, affect the severity and even the character of diseases. Hence a knowledge of the mode and degree in which both health and disease are affected by difference of age and sex and by constitution, whether original or acquired, is not less essential to safe and successful practice than is a special de- scription of diseases themselves. The list of the necessary acquirements of the practical physician, however, is not yet complete. It often happens that, at the bedside, great importance attaches to an individual symptom, and questions occur in relation to it, which are not, and cannot be, answered in the short space devoted to the description of the disease of which it forms