An Epitome of the History of MedicinePark, Roswell
History
An Epitome of the History of Medicine
Park, Roswell
Medicine -- History
Contemporaneous with the school of Broussais, and its antagonist in all
respects, was the Paris School of Pathological Anatomy and Diagnosis,
which has given tone to all medical art. It made it the duty of the
physician to search for changes in the human body, to investigate the
local products of disease, and assigned to medicine the duty of removing
these products. The tendency of its teaching was to treat the patient
rather as a living cadaver than as a sentient being endowed with vital
forces, and the charge which Asclepiades once falsely made against
Hippocrates was revived upon new grounds. Kratzmann wrote some years
ago: "In France every one experiments on the sick, less to attain the
best method of cure than to enrich science with an interesting discovery
and to advance the accuracy of diagnosis by some new physical sign."
The seductiveness of this system promoted still more onesidedness, which
finally almost attained the belief that the science{245} of medicine
really originated in the Anatomical School of Paris.
The forerunners of this school were Bichat and Pinel, and its proper
founders were Corvisart, Dupuytren, and Laënnec. There was also Bayle,
who was first to apply the ear to the thorax in disease of the heart,
and thus became the predecessor of Laënnec and Chomel. He was the
godfather of typhoid fever, and from being a famous clinician became
later a great pathologist. The most celebrated adherent of the method,
however, was Cruveilhier (1791-1873), professor first in Montpellier and
then in Paris, who revived the Anatomical Society founded by Bichat,
and wrote his first essays as the result of Dupuytren's advice; finally,
there came from his pen the famous treatise on _Pathological Anatomy_,
with its magnificent plates,--a work begun in 1830 and not fully
completed until 1864. Like Morgagni, he associated general and
pathological anatomy with bedside observations; also established a class
of inflammations to which belong gangrene and atony, and a certain class
of neuroses and fevers, and endeavored to investigate the different
steps in the development of lesions, not simply their final products.
His teachings concerning pyæmia and phlebitis, which had been first
studied by John Hunter, excited great attention, and he even came to the
one-sided conclusion that "phlebitis rules the whole of pathology."
He was the first to observe that its suppurative form does not occur
primarily, but is secondary to coagulation of the blood.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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