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Osler, William, 1849-1919

"A Series of Lectures Delivered at Yale University on the Silliman Foundation in April, 1913"

In no
direction was the harvest of this combined study more abundant than in
the complicated and confused subject of fever. The work of Louis and of
his pupils, W.W. Gerhard and others, revealed the distinction between
typhus and typhoid fever, and so cleared up one of the most obscure
problems in pathology. By Morgagni's method of "anatomical thinking,"
Skoda in Vienna, Schonlein in Berlin, Graves and Stokes in Dublin,
Marshall Hall, C. J. B. Williams and many others introduced the new and
exact methods of the French and created a new clinical medicine. A
very strong impetus was given by the researches of Virchow on cellular
pathology, which removed the seats of disease from the tissues,
as taught by Bichat, to the individual elements, the cells. The
introduction of the use of the microscope in clinical work widened
greatly our powers of diagnosis, and we obtained thereby a very much
clearer conception of the actual processes of disease. In another way,
too, medicine was greatly helped by the rise of experimental pathology,
which had been introduced by John Hunter, was carried along by Magendie
and others, and reached its culmination in the epoch-making researches
of Claude Bernard. Not only were valuable studies made on the action of
drugs, but also our knowledge of cardiac pathology was revolutionized
by the work of Traube, Cohnheim and others.


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