Sequel to Outlines of medical proof / [Thomas Mayo].

  • Thomas Mayo
Date:
1849
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Sequel to Outlines of medical proof / [Thomas Mayo]. Source: Wellcome Collection.

    11/48 page 5
    they are aware that no two (clinical) facts are alike: and herein they are distinguished from less safe and less enlightened inquirers. In their hands, indeed, the deduction from one case or fact to the other involves an hypothesis as to the nature of their agreement or disagreement; while the less cultivated or gifted person adopts his prototype whole and unbroken. His practice, accordingly, being founded on the common points, or the assumed common points, of cases, without reference to their distinctions, can never reach the idiosyncrasy of the patient, or, at all events, must reach it only by accident. Indeed, it is not always understood what a volume of proof may be contained in the limits of a single case judiciously applied. Of this it would be easy to multiply instances. The fact of femoral and crural phlebitis having been succeeded in a given case by symptoms of cerebral disorder, no cerebral lesion being evinced on dissection, gives ample ground, in any fresh case in which such venous infraction may be detected, for the hypothesis of a functional origin of any cerebral disturbance that may arise in the course of the case. Again, a single case of well-marked cerebral symptoms, which, ending fatally, shall have exhibited pericarditic inflammation without any struc¬ tural disease of the brain, will powerfully assist a diagnosis referring any future cerebral disturbance to disease of the heart, when the latter is manifested during life by its appropriate symptoms. Now, in these two cases an- explanatory hypothesis is suggested. We have seldom this advantage in
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