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
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.
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![of the new method of combining clinical with anatomical work. INIatthew Baillie, their nephew, gave to the world the fruits of their researches, combined with his own, in the Morbid Anatomy published in 1793 and followed in 1799 by his well-known Atlas. Texts and ])lates, alike admirable, formed the most important contribution to practical medicine made in England during the eighteenth century, if we exclude Jenner’s vaccinations. The Series of Engravings was the first of its kind to be published, and the accuracy of the drawings and the careful descriptions made it for years a standard work, and indeed the plates may still be used in illustrating lectures. But the new science reached its fullest develop- ment in France, and helped to promote the revolution in clinical medicine which was effected in that country during the first three decades of the nineteenth century. To the school of Bichat, who was essentially a morbid anatomist, we owe the fruitful studies which gave us our modern outlook on the processes of disease. Corvisart and Bayle, Broussais, Ivaennec, Louis, Chomel, and Andral revived .Das Anatomischen Denkcn (Virchow) of Morgagni. With the old Hipjjocratic method, however, which had been used for cen- turies, and which Morgagni had simply transferred from the bedside to the dead-house, it would have been impossible to get beyond the great Italian. Hitherto the .sense of sight had dominated in the examination of the patient, supplemented to some extent by the sense of touch. Now the hand and ear were to take an equal share, and the eye was to have its powers enormously extended by the use of the microscope. From the Inventum Novum of Auenbrugger (1761) we may date the introduction of modern clinical methods into medicine. His discovery illustrates the fate of a truth announced prematurely. The time was not ripe, and the art of percussion had to await the keen mind of Corvisart before its importance was recognized. The greatest stimulus ever given to internal medicine was the discovery of auscultation by Laennec, whose work Ij Auscidtation Mediate (1819) not merely introduced a new method, but Avas also a treatise on diseases of the heart and lungs, combining the results of clinical study and anatomical investigation. With this book began an entirely new era in medicine. Rich in the descriptions of diseases hitherto unrecognized and unrecognizable, this immortal work not only placed a new and powerful method in the hands of physicians, but also gave an enormous stimulus to the study of internal diseases. The researches of Louis correlated the symptoms and physical signs with the anatomical appearances in pulmonary tuberculosis and in typhoid fever. Chomel, Andral, Bretonneau, Rayer, Piorry, Cruveilhier and others caught the new spirit and made Paris the centre of medical instruction for the whole world. This revolution in internal medicine was effected simply by an extension of the Hippocratic method from the bedside to the dead-liouse and by the correlation of the signs ami symptoms of a disca.se with its anatomical appearances. It was by this method that Richard Bright opened up an entirely new chapter in his studies on the relation of di.sease of the kidneys to dropsy and to albuminous urine. It had already been shown by Blackwell and by Wells, the celebrated Charleston (S. C.) physician, that the urine contained albumin in many cases of drop.sy, but it was not until Bright began a careful investigation of the bodies of patients who had presented these symptoms, that he discovered the](https://iiif.wellcomecollection.org/image/b24907212_0001_0032.jp2/full/800%2C/0/default.jpg)
