Introduction to the Outlines of the Principles of Differential Diagnosis - With Clinical Memoranda #260659

The number of works on medicine, and its various quasi-special branches, that claim the time and attention of over-burdened students and practitioners is so great that only one excuse should be offered for adding to it, viz. Either to say something new or to put forward a more rational and simpler arrangement of what is old. Very little that is new will be found in the following pages, but I claim that I have attempted to arrange the old, old phenomena of disease in such a manner as to Show more clearly their funda mental meanings and relationships. I have utilised the data of physiology, and the facts of pathological anatomy, as the source from which to draw inferences and deductions, which in their turn constitute a critical analysis of clinical symptoms I have endeavoured by this analysis to lead up to the underlying principles which govern disease as well as health. Once these principles, which are few in number, are recognised, bedside symptoms become merely illustra tions of them, varied, it may be, by local and individual peculiari ties, yet ever stamped with such a likeness that the simplest induction will speedily explain the organ of their origin. Isolated, or apparently isolated, facts thus lose their isolation, and become members of a related community; they no longer require separate efforts of memory for their retention, but fall naturally into their places as deductions from a universal law. I thus hope that what I have written will serve not as a text book of medicine, or, indeed, as a storehouse of facts, but as a series of pegs whereon to hang a chain of knowledge which will be ever increasing link by link as experience grows more ripe, and a larger and larger number of varieties of symptoms are recognised as varieties, and not elevated to the rank of species by ignorance of the connecting links. Inasmuch as there is little here that is new, I have mentioned very few authorities for the clinical points I have utilised they are the common possession Of the medical profession at large. A few original ideas of my own are scattered throughout the work; time and clinical testing alone can Show their value, but they are at least founded on some considerable experience, and the method of their exposition is that which I have found useful in teaching by the bed side. My great wish has been to be as accurate as possible, so as not to mislead by false statements, and so sin by commission; the omissions are only too glaring, but limitation of space forbade further inclusions.