Volume 1

Biographic clinics / by George M. Gould.

  • George M. Gould
Date:
1903-
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Biographic clinics / by George M. Gould. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    greater interest to each one, and to science as a whole. Such a consideration of a man’s entire life and how disease conditions it, is primarily a historical study. It is true that such a study'is impossible with many of our patients, because they sometimes live as long as we do, or longer; but even here this want is filled by a careful study of the family history and ancestors, of the past personal history, and of present conditions. Science is accurate knowledge and foreknowledge, and as our medical science improves in accuracy, we, like the paleontologist, are more and more able to recon¬ struct the picture of the entire organism and its essen¬ tial history from a single relic, as, e. g., a bone or a tooth. The patient before us is a history and a prophecy. But the method of thus historically envisag¬ ing and massing the life-work and life-difficulty, can best be suggested and illustrated by the medical de¬ scription of past lives. This, so far as I know, has never been done, at least with scientific thoroughness and sociologic largeness of view. Mere hints of such a method, so far as I have any medical knowledge to warrant it, I have sought to give in these sketches of the medical facts of the lives of De Quincey, Carlyle, Darwin, Huxley, and Browning. Manifest imperfec¬ tions are largely excusable on the ground of an almost utter lack of clinical data. We are able to do no more than catch glimpses, faint and fleeting, of the facts through the incidental, unintended, and medically
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