Goulstonian lectures on the natural history of pulmonary consumption / by A.B. Shepherd.

  • Shepherd, A. B. (Augustus Burke), 1839-1885.
Date:
1877
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Goulstonian lectures on the natural history of pulmonary consumption / by A.B. Shepherd. Source: Wellcome Collection.

    20/140
    this kind—ambitious and difficult as the task be—it is surely of the highest importance to follow out, as far as possible, the dictum of Morgagni, quoted by Andral as the motto of his incomparable work: ‘Nulla autem est alia pro certo noscendi via, nisi quam plurimas et morborum, et dissectionum historias, turn aliorum, turn proprias collectas habere, et inter se comparare.’1 After this fashion, however imperfectly, I intend to lay before the College the results, not of much original work on my part, but of the comparison of other men’s experience and observations, weighed with such justice as my own small knowledge of bedside work and after-death dissections enables me to have. And as I shall try to be precise in my use of language throughout these lectures, I shall not shrink from defining the exact meaning which attaches itself to certain terms in my own mind. Morton, in the very first chapter of his ‘ Phthisiologia,’ 2 has accurately laid down what he intended by the name, the English rendering of which, rather than any Latin equivalent, I have purposely placed in the title of these lectures. ‘ Phthisis Pulmonaris est consumptio partium universalis a morbido affectu seu infarctione, tumore, inflam- matione et exulceratione Pulmonum primum orta, indeque tussi, dyspnoea, aliisque ejusmodi symptomatis thoracicis ab ipso initio stipata, et cum febre primum lenta et hectica, dein inflammatoria, et tandem putrida intermittente conjuncta.’3 On those words, ‘ primum orta,’ ‘ ab ipso initio stipata,’ hang more of the natural history of this disease than may be at first suspected. That definition I accept with but small reservation. Had its terms, thus accurately laid down, been followed by later writers, we could never have had the confusion, which even still exists in some minds, between cases of undoubted phthisis and cases of as undoubted miliary tuberculosis. I shall show presently, from the histories and examinations given by various writers of a more distant as well as of the present day, that the two clauses of Morton’s definition on which I have laid stress ' De Sedibus et Causis Morb., lib. iv. Proem.: ed. sec.: Patavii, 17(56: i. 220. 2 Phthisiologia seu Exercitationes de Phthisi Tribus Libris compreliensce. Authore Ricardo Morion, Med. D.-—Londini: mdclxxxix.