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Outlines of the Science and Practice of Medicine
Outlines of the Science and Practice of Medicine Author:William Aitken, Georg Friedrich Martens, William Culverwell 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: best and most approved theories respecting diseases and their remedies, as well as with physiological and pathological knowledge. In prescribing remedies, the... more » individuality of the patient must be carefully considered, not less than the nature of the disease. The points essential to the individual, and which must influence the prescription of remedies, are—the age of the patient, the habits of life, as to alcohol especially, the general strength of the patieat-s constitution, the stability of the nerve centres, the muscular power of the heart, the contractile resistance of the arteries, and the specific nature of the cause of the disease. Every phase in the natural course and progress of the disease must be foreseen and provided for, implying a full knowledge of its nature, seat, and stage. The known tendencies of the disease to a fatal termination ought to be guarded against, especially as regards failure of the heart-s action, systemic death by decline of aortic pressure, rapid as in syncope, or gradual and prolonged as in disease of days, weeks, or months- duration; the state of the chief organs and functions of the body, especially the heart, lungs, and kidneys, must be specially investigated, with reference to medicines and the management of the case, or impairment of the nervous centres or of the lungs. VL—Progress of the Case. The patient is to be visited and re-examined at intervals, varying as regards time, according to the gravity of the case, and the rapidity with which it progresses from one stage to another in its natural course. In thus noting the progress of the case from day to day, the same plau of examination in regions and systems is to be followed out as here recommended for the first examination of the case. Its continuous history naturally divid...« less