The practical medicine of to-day : two addresses delivered before the British Medical Association, and the Epidemiological Society / by Sir William Jenner.

  • Jenner, William, Sir, 1815-1898.
Date:
1869
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: The practical medicine of to-day : two addresses delivered before the British Medical Association, and the Epidemiological Society / by Sir William Jenner. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by King’s College London. The original may be consulted at King’s College London.

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    dress will more and more directly attain its object, it will be deficient in novelty and scientific interest; and so as an address be unworthy of its predecessors. For that I crave your pardon. Among the really great advances in Medicine may be placed the separation of chronic degenerations from dis- eases. By degenerations I mean— 1. Retrograde metamorphoses; passive changes as distinct from living processes; and especially granular disintegration, fatty degeneration and calcification, rotting and petrifaction, changes which may and do occur in tissues and structures removed from the body, in the bottle of the museum. 2. That change accompanied by thickening and diminu- tion of elasticity which occurs in certain tissues in advancing life. The general diffusion of those degenera- tions is the characteristic of advancing age. It is in fact old age; so much so, that, if a means of preventing these changes should be discovered, that means would be the long-sought elixir of life. Rotting, petrifaction, and the special change in nutrition to which I have referred, although they occur as, so to say, natural changes in advancing life, may occur in the structures of the young, if those structures be damaged by active disease. As illustration of the clinical importance of these ad- vances in our knowledge, I may refer to the modifications in our opinions and in our practice that have resulted from