162 Extracts from Dr. Yeats's 



trodden, and is still followed by others, without, as far as I am abl^ 

 to see, much beneficial result of practical utility in the alleviation 

 of pain, and mitigation of disease. The desideratum in his Morbid 

 Anato7ny, and in most similar works, is a detail of the symptoms 

 which preceded and accompanied the morbid condition of the parts 

 when living ; and even with those where the symptoms have been 

 detailed, I scarcely find that the knowledge of those symptoms, 

 with the appearances after death, has suggested any remedial 

 means for that which the dissection has discovered. The seat of 

 pain, too, is not always the seat of the disease producing it. 

 Look at the painful affections of the head, arising from a diseased 

 stomach ; at the morbid condition of the stomach and liver, pro- 

 duced by excitation of the brain ; at the pains of the back, 

 consequent upon various diseases of the abdominal viscera ; at 

 the uneasy state of the stomach, too, connected with organic 

 disease of the heart, with many other examples familiar to you 

 all ; and you will have an illustration of this observation. 

 Of the latter example, the case of a great law officer, whom I 

 several times saw before his death, is a very strong instance. He 

 laboured under angina pectoris, as dissection afterwards proved ; 

 but he always persuaded himself that his complaint was in the 

 stomach, and that if he could get rid of his disease there, he would 

 be well. The coronary arteries were ossified, and the preparation 

 is in the museum of this college. I had warned his family of the 

 nature of his complaint, and that he would die suddenly ; and so it 

 happened. A morbid state of the stomach long continued will 

 lead to various diseases, to those of the liver, to apoplexy, palsy, 

 phthisis, affections of the skin, &c. Dissection will not tell me 

 how these various effects are produced, nor how they are to be 

 obviated. The first traces of morbid symptoms are to be coun- 

 teracted by different proceedings long before those effects are 

 produced which morbid dissection exhibits : for the consequences 

 require a mode of treatment very opposite to that by which the 

 original causes are to be combated. In fact, those effects are, as it 

 •were, conversions from one disease into another, so that what we 

 see in dissection is a different disease from that primary one which 

 the symptoms originally pointed out. A great deal of interesting 

 matter on this subject is to be found in Hoffman de Morhorum 

 Transmutatione^ in Baglivi, and in an ingenious paper of the late 

 Dr. Ferriar on the Conversion of Diseases. Morbid anatomy, it 

 is true, confirms to us what we learn from the symptoms, viz. that 

 irritation in one organ will often produce disease in a distant one, 



