Physical diagnosis : a guide to methods of clinical investigation / by G.A. Gibson and William Russell.

  • Gibson, George Alexander, 1854-1913.
Date:
1890
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Physical diagnosis : a guide to methods of clinical investigation / by G.A. Gibson and William Russell. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by The University of Leeds Library. The original may be consulted at The University of Leeds Library.

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    diagnosis, and it is with a view to help the student of clinical medicine in this important and difficult department that this book is written. In it we have in the main followed the lines which, in our experience as Tutors in Clinical Medicine in the Royal Infirmary of Edinburgh, have appeared to be most useful. Physical Examination embraces and is confined to facts which are apparent to the senses of sight, touch, and hearing, and to these may be added smell. The application of sight is known as inspection, touch as palpation, and hearing as auscultation or percussion, according to whether the sounds are produced by the organs them- selves, or by tapping the different regions of the trunk. It is of course necessary to be acquainted with what is to be seen, felt, and heard on examination of the different regions of the healthy body before the abnormal can be appreciated. It is necessary to be familiar with the normal shape of the abdomen, in order to describe the alterations which occur in disease ; to know the character of the normal cardiac impulse, in order to appreciate deviations from it; and to have an intimate acquaintance with the normal sounds heard on auscultation, before studying the sounds present in disease. Students ought, therefore, to avail themselves to the utmost of every opportunity of examining healthy indivi- duals, and particularly healthy chests, both in hospital and dispensary practice; they will thus become familiar with the normal and the variations which occur within the limits of health. Physical diagnosis, however, includes not only investigations by means of the senses; it also inquires into the physical causes or conditions which produce the various iDhenomena. For instance, on inspection, an abdomen is found to be distended; by the aid of percussion and palpation, and the application of an elementary knowledge of physics, it is decided whether it is distended with fluid in the peritoneal cavity or gas in the