Change of type in disease : the address in medicine, delivered at the thirty-third annual meeting of the British Medical Association, held in Leamington, August 1865 / by William Stokes.

  • Stokes, William.
Date:
1865
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Change of type in disease : the address in medicine, delivered at the thirty-third annual meeting of the British Medical Association, held in Leamington, August 1865 / by William Stokes. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    The declaration that it has been or can be proved by a more advanced pathology, that bleeding never was the proper remedy for fevers and inflamma¬ tions, has as yet no scientific ground. It is not yet given to us, notwithstanding all our advance in normal and in morbid anatomy, in the physiology of health or in that of disease, to be able to say, from the most minute examination of the dead organ or struc¬ ture, what were all the conditions which attended it during life, in health or in disease—what were its local vital phenomena, what was its accompanying constitutional state. The words of Goethe, so well rendered by Dr. Anster, convey a deep practical lesson to those who would base medicine on anato¬ mical change: “ Alas ! the spirit is withdrawn — That which informed the mass is gone. We scrutinise it when it ceases to be itself. Finger and feel it, and call this Experiment analysis.” But let us ask, Which is the most probable of these two suppositions? First, that our predecessors, including sucli as I have named, were bad observers, incapable of divining the truth, and blind adopters of an antiquated and mischievous method ; or, se¬ condly, that the type of disease has changed, and that in our own time. It happens, fortunately, that we can examine two living witnesses of great au¬ thority in this matter, and can refer to the works of two more who have left us their written testimony. Dr. Watson and Dr. Christison are still among us, in health and intellectual vigour—long may they be so; Dr. Alison and Dr. Graves have been but lately re¬ moved. Now, all these testify that the character of diseases has in our time changed from a sthenic to an asthenic type; that is to say, from a condition in which in¬ flammatory reaction was the prominent feature, to another where that state was absent, or, if present, only ephemeral—a condition observable in essential and in local disease, in which the antiphlogistic treat¬ ment was well borne, and productive of great relief,