The principles and methods of medical observation and research : for the use of advanced students and junior practitioners / by Thomas Laycock.

  • Laycock, Thomas, 1812-1876.
Date:
1864
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: The principles and methods of medical observation and research : for the use of advanced students and junior practitioners / by Thomas Laycock. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by The University of Leeds Library. The original may be consulted at The University of Leeds Library.

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    essential to success, and whicli can only be attained, like aU other arts, by self-culture, under proper training and guidance. The author has aimed at these ends; and this ex- plains the peculiar matter and plan of his hook. He has taken up some of the more important principles of obser- vation and induction, and in the familiar language of a lecture, and devoid of the technical phrases and methods of systematic writers (which may be learnt best in Mill's system of logic, and other works), so laid them before the student that, if zealous in self-culture, he may discipline his own mind to a successful encounter with the exigen- cies of his profession. With a view to more special needs, the author has given prominence to fallacies of theory and observation, and laid down a method of investigating a case founded on the principles. In pursuance of his plan he has also developed the clinical observation of consti- tutional morbid states, partly because a knowledge of them is at the root of all generalisations in therapeutics, and partly to counteract the mischievous tendency to minute physical researches and narrow conclusions into which the student is apt to fall. The natural order of diseased conditions follows necessarily the natural order of healthy states, as developed in the laws of vital perio- dicity. Since these are stated in few, if any, of our phy- siological or practical works, and are little understood generally, the author has pointed them out, and the ap- plications of which they are capable. A knowledge of