A system of personal biologic examinations the condition of adequate medical and scientific conduct of life / George M. Gould.

  • Gould, George Milbrey, 1848-1922.
Date:
[1900]
Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

Credit: A system of personal biologic examinations the condition of adequate medical and scientific conduct of life / George M. Gould. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by The Royal College of Surgeons of England. The original may be consulted at The Royal College of Surgeons of England.

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    piece of dead tissue, in the hands of the pathologist? Certainly only to prevent other living eyes and organs from becoming as these dead ones have. True pathol- ogy is surely knowledge of disease in the making. The pathologist's final problem is to prevent pathologic spe- cimens from ever coming into his hands. Qua patholo- gist he must commit scientific suicide. Most of our fashionable pathology is the paleontology, not the bi- ology, of disease; but was it not said of old, that it is better to be a living dog than a dead lion ? How is dis- ease in the making ever to be discovered except by exam- inations, continuous observation, of the living suppos- ably-well organism ? Is it not even true of living disease that one-half the patients seen by the doctor are seen far too late? For paresis, locomotor ataxia, etc., and for many psychic diseases we do nothing, because we recognize their ex- istence so late that nothing can be done. Had they been seen earlier injury could have been prevented. Surely in more than 25 per cent, of my patients many years or whole lifetimes cf suffering and disease could have been obviated. It is doubtless as true in general medicine. All good medicine inevitably tends to be- come preventive medicine; all good physicians labor to stop disease before it arrives. The whole ingenuity of the trained diagnostician is now expended on the prob- lem of the earlier symptom. He is the greatest dis- coverer who finds the presymptom, or the symptom of the symptom; the greatest therapeutist is he who cures before the disease exists, he who starves the bacillus to death, he who stops the evil habit, thus preventing the malfunction that becomes organic disease. The best cat is the one that kills the rat that eats the malt that lies in the house that Jack built. It is a truism that gout exists in the patient’s system long before it causes a twinge of pain; the kidneys are ruined before the slightest subjective system is manifest; there may be heart changes indicating the existence of nephritis, which a single uranalysis may not detect; arterioscle- rosis may be present prior to subjective symptoms, and the objective examination would detect it; there may be unsuspected diabetes without symptoms until exam-