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The Knowledge of the Physician; A Course of Lectures Delivered at the Boston University School of Medicine, May, 1884
The Knowledge of the Physician A Course of Lectures Delivered at the Boston University School of Medicine May 1884 Author:Richard Hughes General Books publication date: 2009 Original publication date: 1884 Original Publisher: O. Clapp and son Subjects: Homeopathy Notes: This is a black and white OCR reprint of the original. It has no illustrations and there may be typos or missing text. When you buy the General Books edition of this book you get free trial access to Million-... more »Books.com where you can select from more than a million books for free. Excerpt: III. THE KNOWLEDGE OF DISEASE. The physician is a hygienist, but he is above all things a healer. His "high and sole mission "as Hahnemann states at the outset of the Organon "is to restore the sick to health -- to cure, as we term it." In this pursuit he has to deal with disease, as the subject of his operations, and with drugs, as the chief instruments with which he works. The greater part of your medical life, whether as students or as practitioners, will have to be spent in acquiring and applying the knowledge of these two. It cannot, therefore, be without profit that we should spend some time in considering what such knowledge should be -- in what proportion it should deal with the phenomena, the laws, and the causes, which we have seen to be the elements of all knowing. I suppose that all lecturers on the Practice of Physic begin the account of particular diseases by describing their clinical features. " Every now and then," as my former teacher at King's College -- Dr. George Budd -- used to say, "we meet with" casespresenting such and such groups of phenomena and sensations. He would then give the name by which the malady thus constituted is styled, and would proceed to relate how it came about, and wherein it essentially consisted, so far as these points were known. But observe the difference involved in this "so far/' The aetiology and pathologyof the disease were more or less uncertain, and our conception of them was liable to vary as new facts came into our view. But its clinical features remained. They were those which perchance ...« less