A treatise on physiology applied to pathology / By F.J.V. Broussais ... Translated from the French, by John Bell ... and R. La Roche.

  • Broussais, F. J. V. (François Joseph Victor), 1772-1838.
Date:
1826
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Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: A treatise on physiology applied to pathology / By F.J.V. Broussais ... Translated from the French, by John Bell ... and R. La Roche. Source: Wellcome Collection.

    20/576 (page 12)
    disease were presented, in authors, under an aspect totally dissimilar from the phenomena of health. This proposition, which I have already demonstrated in the Examen des Doctrines, will appear more evident from the approximations we shall have occasion to point out in the subsequent parts of this treatise. I have read with extreme pleasure the article on the stein nic nerve, written by professor Lobstein, and contained in the Dictionnaire des Sciences Médicales. The author there considers the ganglionic nerves under a point of view which appears to me highly interesting, and approaches nearly to the idea I had already formed of them (See Journal Universel des Sciences Médicales, t. XII. 1818, and the Examen des Doctrines). Such essays abound in useful application to practical medicine, and are worth many long treatises. “4 intend to draw. It is for having isolated symptoms, not mere- ly from the organs, but also from the agents which modify these latter before, and during the whole course of, the disease, that physicians have created those entities, which, as we have al- ready proved in the Examen des Doctrines, disfigure the science of medicine. - The same error has been committed in physiology. Functions have been made too independent of those modifying agents by which they are maintained; , owing to which the: change from the physiological to the pathological state, has not been hither- to completely discovered; or, in other words, it is owing to this, that medical physiology has not been created. The same error having hitherto existed in the method of study- ing and teaching these two sciences, or rather these two branches of the same science, it is evident that as soon as the one has as- sumed the right path, it is natural the other should follow. | It is not my intention, then, to present here a history of the functions, viewed abstractedly; but rather to give the history of the physical life of man. Our object is to know the appearances that the animal matter of which he is composed assumes,—to discover the organs that are formed from it,—the order in which these organs are presented to the action of external bodies, —the in- ternal changes that are brought about, when those bodies we de- nominated modifiers (modificateurs) are placed in connexion with É a _