Laennec-one hundred years after the address in medicine / [William Sydney Thayer].

  • Thayer, William Sydney, 1864-1932
Date:
[1919]
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Licence: In copyright

Credit: Laennec-one hundred years after the address in medicine / [William Sydney Thayer]. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    in auscultation and percussion demands careful supervision of the student—instruction in small groups. The student must be led to make his own discoveries, to solve his own problems—he must be directed to a proper course of reasoning. Physical diagnosis can be taught only by the bedside. Again, this early instruction in physical diagnosis should not be relegated wholly to the young instructors. One of the most important duties of the professor of medicine is to give his personal attention to the students who are for the first time approaching the patient. It is at this point in the career of the student that the wise and experienced clinician can exercise his most important and lasting influence. It is, I believe, the attempt to teach the diagnostic art didactically that is at the root of the inefficiency of so many practitioners to-day If, at the outset, the student be encouraged to read books or to listen to discourses on diagnostic methods, he starts with a handicap of preconceived ideas which he may never overcome. Again, the necessity of familiarity with the normal is too often overlooked. No student should leave the medical school without appreciating the frequency, position and character of the sounds heard so com¬ monly on the expansion of atelectatic borders of lungs. No man should be allowed to enter the practice of medicine who has not, by experience, made himself familiar with the ausculta¬ tion of the normal heart and with those murmurs which are the rule, rather than the exception, in young individuals, especially cardio¬ respiratory murmurs. If he be not familiar with the normal, he will be a poor judge of the significance of deviations from the ordinary. “The power to explore is to my mind a great part of the art.” In epitomizing the life of a great physician, I have desired to emphasize the thought that the kernel of the art of medicine lies in the power to explore. This power is gained only by experience and by practice. The last century has perfected the art of diagnosis in many ways. But proficiency in the basic methods of exploration which we owe to Auenbrugger and to Laennec is as vital to-day as it was an hundred years ago. In those parts of this paper which deal with the life of Laennec, the author has drawn largely on the works of Saintignon (Saintignon, Dr. Henri: “Laennec: Sa Vie et Son (Euvre,” Paris, J. B. Bailliere et Fils, 19, rue Hautefeuille, 1904), and Rouxeau (Rouxeau, Alfred: “Laennec avant 1806,” Paris, 1912).