System of Clinical Medicine : With Notes and a Series of Lectures (Classic Reprint)

Excerpt from System of Clinical Medicine: With Notes and a Series of Lectures

Having been, for many years, engaged in giving Clinical Instruction at the Meath and Sir Patrick Dun's Hospitals, I thought it to be my duty occasionally to publish the results of my observations in the form either of detached Essays, or successive series of Lectures; the former were printed in the Dublin Hospital Reports, and the Dublin Medical Journal, the latter appeared in various English periodicals, but chiefly in that ex cellent publication, the London Medical Gazette. Many of the detached papers were subsequently translated into French, German, and Italian, and several courses of the Lectures were published by Doctor Robley Dunglison, in a separate volume at Philadelphia. This has encouraged me not only to continue my exertions in the cultivation of practical me dicine, but to revise what I had written and compress the whole within the limits of a single volume. It is necessary to mention that the Lee tures were all originally delivered extempore, and were printed from notes taken by a short-hand writer. The reader being made aware of this cir cumstance, will kindly make due allowance for the many imperfections of style, and the redundancy and repetition which occur but too frequently in this work. In revising the whole, I have been at more pains to im prove the substance than to polish the surface, and have rigorously ex cluded every assertion and conclusion which my subsequent experience has not verified.

It should likewise be borne in mind that this volume has no pretensions to the title even of Outlines of the Practice of Physic, for many most im portant diseases are not mentioned at all, none are fully described, and nowhere is treatment considered in all its bearings my object in lectur iug has, in truth, been always strictly clinical, and except where the sub jcet was very tempting, and its discussion seemed to promise some useful and novel result, I have seldom allowed myself to deviate from the legi timate pursuit of that object; on the subject of Fever, perhaps, I may appear to have enlarged far beyond the limits of my prescribed plan, but a very sufficient explanation of this apparent exception may be given, for as the wards of our Hospitals are never withoutfever cases, every suc cessive season suggested some new remarks on that disease, and when the task of consolidating these courses of Lectures was undertaken, it he came necessary to collect the various scattered observations on Fever, which occurred in almost every Lecture, and consequently (although many insulated cases of Fever, and the remarks they at the time called forth.

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