A bedside manual of physical diagnosis : ... with an appendix, containing a plan for the registration of cases in hospital and private pratice : also an abstract of Mr. Farr's statistical nosology / by Charles Cowan.

  • Cowan Charles, 1806-1868.
Date:
1842
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: A bedside manual of physical diagnosis : ... with an appendix, containing a plan for the registration of cases in hospital and private pratice : also an abstract of Mr. Farr's statistical nosology / by Charles Cowan. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh. The original may be consulted at the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh.

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    limited expectations ; in both, utility is sacrificed, and the progress of improvement arrested. We deprecate the intention, as well as folly of the effort, so as to provide the student with materials of diagnosis, that he is absolved from the exercise of his reflection, and from dependence on his own resources, believing that in physics as well as morals, if we would arrive at any really valuable result, the practice must be conjoined with the precept, and in the application of our principles to particular instances, much is neces- sarily left for the observer’s sagacity to fill up. To become a successful auscultator does not simply include the possession of the finest ear, the most im- proved stethoscope, and a memory charged with a long catalogue of possible combinations, but to have ac- quired by experience and personal research a practical acquaintance with the physical structure and natural boundaries of our organs, with their various patholo- gical conditions, with the laws of the production and transmission of sound, and to have exercised our senses as the aids of the intelligence, rather than as the prompters of our memory. If only superficially stu- died, auscultation and percussion will but increase our confusion, leading us into errors which, had the atten- tion been wholly directed to the general symptoms, we might perhaps have avoided; but if steadily pursued, they will prove a source of constantly recurring satis- faction, centralizing our indications, and establishing the prognosis, where uncertainty and indecision would otherwise have prevailed. They often enable us to be positive when our superiors, both in knowledge and experience, are necessarily in doubt; and if they some- times check the hopes which the general symptoms have encouraged, they as frequently justify favourable antici- pations where others despond. They cannot therefore be too assiduously, though they may be too exclusively cultivated, and however far from having attained the perfection our wishes would dictate, they must in their present state be regarded as invaluable additions to our