Medical Research and Human Welfare Author:William Williams Keen Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: INSTRUMENTS OF PRECISION Among the most important means by which Medical Research is promoted are instruments of precision. When I studied medicine, a few, in... more » fact a very few, doctors possessed a microscope. Strange to say, the medical colleges themselves had none. Only those private students who were so fortunate as to have the most enlightened preceptors ever saw a microscope, much less had the chance to use one. I doubt if there were half a dozen thermometers and hypodermic syringes in the whole Army of the Potomac in the Civil War. A number of years passed before self-registering thermometers were made. The first short clinical thermometer I ever saw was brought to me from London by Weir Mitchell in 1876. The first book in medical thermometry was published by Wiinderlich in 1869, four years after the Civil War closed. Imagine the plight of the mother of a family to-day without a thermometer! Now, for experimental researches, there are electric thermometers by which one can make continuous observations in a hospital and record them at1 stations a mile away from the patient and the instrument. Mosso has devised an apparatus on which the patient lies, so delicately balanced that if he is spoken to, or a door is closed with a slight jar, even during his sleep, the brain is roused to activity — more blood is swiftly supplied to the brain, the head becomes heavier, and that end of the apparatus falls. How and why, you ask, does this blood leave other parts of the body and go to the head? In man and animals, in close proximity to the jugular vein in the neck, is the sympathetic nerve — a slender, nervous cord, the use of which nobody knew. Just before the Civil War Claude Bernard cut this cord," just to see what would happen." He found that the pupil of the eye on the same s...« less