The early history of instrumental precision in medicine : an address before the second Congress of American Physicians and Surgeons, September 23rd, 1891 . PEECISION IN MEDICINE. 23 If any man wishes to nourish a taste for cynical criticism, let himstudy honestly the books of the 18th century on the pulse down toHeberden and Falconer, or even beyond them. It is observationgone minutely mad ; a whole Lilliput of symptoms ; an exasperatingwaste of human intelligence. I know few more dreary deserts inmedical literature, from the essay on the Chinese Art of Feeling thePulse, with which Floyer load
The early history of instrumental precision in medicine : an address before the second Congress of American Physicians and Surgeons, September 23rd, 1891 . PEECISION IN MEDICINE. 23 If any man wishes to nourish a taste for cynical criticism, let himstudy honestly the books of the 18th century on the pulse down toHeberden and Falconer, or even beyond them. It is observationgone minutely mad ; a whole Lilliput of symptoms ; an exasperatingwaste of human intelligence. I know few more dreary deserts inmedical literature, from the essay on the Chinese Art of Feeling thePulse, with which Floyer loaded his otherwise, valuable essay, toMarquets method of learning to know the pulse by musical notes, anart in which he was not alone.* And error died hard. The doctrine Fig. 15,. O of the specific pulses, a pulse for every malady,although rejected by De Haen, is in countless vol-umes, and survived up to 1827, when Ruccofdedicates his book on the pulse to Sir HenryHalford. Meanwhile whole volumes, like Bryceon Asthma,J; exist without a pulse or breath count;but farther back, in a queer book on the heart byBryan Robinson,§ I find the first clear statementof the proportional relation of the pulse to respi-ration. Even those among you given to readingthe authors of the end of the last and the firsttwenty years of the present century, may be sur-prised to learn that statements of the numbers ofpulse and respiration are very rare in Rush, Cul-len and their contemporaries. Heberden|| andFalconer who, perhaps, set too much value onpulse counts, made no impression on their contemporaries. In Cor-visart on the Heart we hear little or nothing in this direction, and inseven hundred pages of Laennec there is one pulse count and nonumeration of the breathing. It seems incr
Size: 1539px × 1624px
Photo credit: © The Reading Room / Alamy / Afripics
License: Licensed
Model Released: No
Keywords: ., bookcentury1800, bookdecade1890, bookidearlyhistory, bookyear1892
