Popular medical errors / [James Bower Harrison].

  • Harrison, James Bower
Date:
1851
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Popular medical errors / [James Bower Harrison]. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    to be taken into consitleratlon, at any rate by non-professional people, when they are led into conjeetures on such a subject. With the advance of medical information there has necessarily been an increased anxiety to fix the precise seat of diseases: thus, where we formerly heard of dropsies and fluxes of blood, which were, after all, only effects, we now hear chiefly of the structural diseases in which they arise. The ailments, therefore, remain the same; but the names have varied with the advance- ment of knowledge. Again, the introduction of the stethoscope has enabled medical men to detect and understand disease even in the living subject with an accuracy hitherto unattainable, and they are not now contented with the names which were sufficiently accurate for a vaguer pathology. I have stated, however, that I did not feel prepared to say exactly how' far diseases of the heart may have become more prevalent than formerly. It is said, at any rate, that during the French Revolution they were so. The frequency with which a name is employed will not, how'ever, determine the question.
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