Volume 1

A system of medicine by eminent authorities in Great Britain, the United States and the Continent / edited by William Osler, assisted by Thomas McCrae.

Date:
1907-10
Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

Credit: A system of medicine by eminent authorities in Great Britain, the United States and the Continent / edited by William Osler, assisted by Thomas McCrae. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by Royal College of Physicians, London. The original may be consulted at Royal College of Physicians, London.

    31/986
    Stevenson, and Caldwell, who began medical instruction in Montreal, from which originated the Medical Faculty of McGill College. Boerhaavc and his pu])ils extended the range of observation and in a measure restored to medicine that robust common sense which had been the distinguishing feature of both Ilipjjocrates and Sydenham. At the end of the eighteenth century men were floundering in a sea of speculation and there was no definiteness in diagnosis nor any safe basis for treatment. The next great step came from an extension of the Hippocratic method to the dead-house, the study of morbid anatomy in association with clinical observation. IV. Many of the sixteenth and seventeenth century physicians had keen appreciation of the value of postmortem examinations. Harvey has a most interesting paragraph on the subject,’ and his works testify to the zeal with which he sought for the more hidden causes of disease; but with no one in the seventeenth century did morbid anatomy become a life study, and no one had realized its true position in the science of medicine until IMorgagni (1683-1771) published the De Sedibus et Causis Morbonim per Anatomen Indagatis (1761). Others before this date had made interesting collections of cases: Ridley in England, and Bonetus of Geneva, who published the Sepulcretum Anatomiciwi in 1679. Valuable as is this great work, it had not the profound influence of the De Sedibus, as it was a collection of cases from the literature, and lacked that freshness and interest which Morgagni was able to give to his reports. In them for the first time we find a careful clinical study of the symptoms of disease and an equally careful examination of the organs after death. It was the novelty of the mode of presentation quite fis much as the vivid picture of disease that made Morgagni’s work mark an epoch in the history of clinical medicine. Even today it is a storehouse of valuable facts, and several of the sections, more particularly that on the heart and bloodvessels, are so rich in original descriptions that no man’s education in morbid anatomy can be said to be complete without an acquaintance with its pages. The example of the great Italian wiis soon followed in other countries, particularly in England and in France. John Hunter, with his insatiable hunger for knowledge of all sorts, was equally great as a morbid- and as a comparative anatomist. The Hunterian specimens in the great Mu.seum at Lincoln’s Inn Fields bear witne.ss to the accuracy of his descriptions, to the insistence, when po.ssible, upon clinical details, and to the keen appreciation which he had of the importance of the study of morbid anatomy in the education of medical men. His brother William, also an enthusia.stic student of morbid anatomy, formed an important collection, and the specimens and notes in his museum, now at Glasgow, show that he too was alive to the value ' “The examination of a single body of one who ha.s dic'd of tabe.s or .some other disease of long standing, or poi.sonous nature, is of more service to med- icine than the dissection of the bodies of ten men who have been hanged.’’ Letter to Riolan.