Medical diagnosis : with special reference to practical medicine : a guide to the knowledge and discrimination of diseases / by J. M. Da Costa.

  • Jacob Mendes Da Costa
Date:
1890
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Medical diagnosis : with special reference to practical medicine : a guide to the knowledge and discrimination of diseases / by J. M. Da Costa. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by the Augustus C. Long Health Sciences Library at Columbia University and Columbia University Libraries/Information Services, through the Medical Heritage Library. The original may be consulted at the the Augustus C. Long Health Sciences Library at Columbia University and Columbia University.

    32/1016 (page 26)
    symptoms, regardless of their cause, and without understanding their true relation and significance, is groping in tiie dark. His treatment is vacillating; drug replaces drug ; alleviation is taken for a cure; and the experience obtained is utterly untrustworthy. One great advantage, indeed, of attending carefully to diagnosis is, that it enables us to use remedies knowingly and with decision ; to appreciate what they are effecting ; to abstain from such as must be injurious. There is less needless meddling, more calmness; the treatment rises above the consideration of the moment, and takes into account Avhat is for the patient's ultimate good. It is sometimes urged tliat the accurate detection of disease makes timid practitioners, and deprives thoni of confidence in medicines. More just is it to say that it shows how wide is the chasm between our ae(|uaintance with morbid conditions and our acquaintance with remedies; how far, unfortunately, our skill to detect disease still outruns our power to cure it. There is undoubtedly, however, a danger w^hieh may arise from paying very minute attention to diagnosis. The study of it is so interesting, and capable of being conducted so entirely without reference to other points, and especially to the treatment of the complaint, that some minds are carried away, and, lost in the pur- suit of diagnostic knowledge, forget for what purposes chiefly that knowledge is profitable. Its main use is to enable us to fore- tell the course and probable issue of a malady, and to frame, with iniderstancling, plans for its relief. Nor ought we ever to be unmindful how important it is, in basing the management of a disease on its diagnosis, to found that diagnosis on a general sur- vey of all the circumstances; how necessary not to assign promi- nence to minor points ; and how the extent of the affection, the circumstances under which it has occurred, the sympathetic dis- turbances produced, and the vital state of the patient, belong, rightly considered, quite as much to the diagnosis as the recog- nition of the precise seat and exact anatomical character of the malady, and are, in truth, frequently its more im])ortant part.