The practical medicine of today, two addresses, Issue 122

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Page 28 - Solitary cases, outbreaks confined to single houses-, to small villages, and to parts of large towns — cases isolated, it seems, from all sources of fallacy — and epidemics affecting the inhabitants of large though limited localities, have all united to support by their testimony the truth of the opinion that the admixture of a trace of faecal matter, but especially of the bowel-excreta of typhoid fever with the water supplied for drinking purposes, is the most efficient cause of the spread of...
Page 33 - Who thai? has suffered from a painful local affection can think of the alleviation to his sufferings which followed on the subcutaneous injection of an anodyne without gratitude ? Who is there that has had to submit to the knife of the surgeon whose heart does not overflow with gratitude to those who introduced and perfected local and general anaesthesia.
Page 29 - ... what modern medicine has shown for health purposes they should have been, these places would not have suffered the terrible outbreaks of typhoid fever, of which the medical officer of the Privy Council gives such full details in the tenth volume of his inexpressibly valuable reports. The persons who died at these places from typhoid fever, and a large proportion of those who died at the east of London from cholera, were as certainly killed by the water they drank, and killed without need, as...
Page 4 - I supposed they did, viz. by increasing the escape of watery matter from the radicles of the portal vein, I am not in the least shaken in my belief that the symptoms which I attribute to over-distension of the portal vein are relieved by their action, or that their action is followed by the disappearance of watery fluid from the peritoneal cavity and from the cellular tissue.
Page 3 - Again, modern observation has proved that certain acute diseases formerly supposed of indefinite duration, run a definite course, ie end spontaneously at a certain date from their outset, and therefore that conclusions as to the efficacy of drugs to cut short these diseases, conclusions drawn before their definite duration was known, were founded on false premises, and consequently are not trustworthy.
Page 35 - ... and in America, the widely diffused acquaintance of the profession with modern languages, the rapidity with which knowledge spreads, the confirmation, correction, or refutation which follows so quickly on the publication of novelties, the great ability, the absence of prejudice, the untiring energy, and the truthfulness exhibited by the younger workers in the field of our science, render me hopeful that the next quarter of a century will be distinguished by a far greater progress than has the...
Page 41 - Not one child ought to die from rickets itself, and death from its consequences ought to be extremely rare ; and yet the mortality from rickets, from diseases which would not occur but for the pre-existing rickets, and from diseases which would be trifling but for the co-existing rickets, is enormous. Laryngismus stridulus, chronic...
Page 7 - ... few. It is to the experience of the mass of the profession that we look for the final establishment of doctrine and of rules of practice. In the selection I am about to make, in confirmation of the statement that our science, in its advance as a practical art, stands second to none, I am conscious that I...
Page 2 - ... altogether impossible, or at the best doubtful; so many in which the practical difficulties in the way of diagnosis, though the art be perfect, are insuperable ; so many in which, the diagnosis being clear, we know that we are impotent to cure ; so many in reg-ard of which our apparently well-founded expectations of effecting a cure prove vain, that even the most hopefully minded must now and then be tempted to doubt if Medicine be really advancing as a practical art.
Page 57 - The value placed by a community on individual life is one of the great tests of the state of its civilization. It speaks but little for our advance in civilization that the death-rate in England, due as it is in so great a degree to preventable causes, should still be what it was twenty years since — that the death-rate of the ten years '41 — '50, and the death-rate of the ten years '51 — '60 should be nearly the same.

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