Cronian Lectures on the Colon. 163 



and this is important and useful information ; but we only see the 

 effects produced, for we must be guided by the symptoms in the 

 living body what means we are to employ to counteract the tendency 

 to produce these effects ; and these we learn from experience, and 

 from patient and discriminating observation. I do not complain so 

 much of the minuteness to which these dissections are carried, as 

 of the unnecessary importance which is given to them in a practical 

 point of view. We find great labour bestowed to trace a brown, a 

 white, a yellow, a hard, and a sofl tubercle of the liver, but no 

 practical indications of utility are derived therefrom. If there be 

 a polypus in a ventricle of the heart, or an ossification of its coronary 

 arteries, or of its valves, or of the chordae tendineae, or of the mus- 

 cular substance itself, however it may gratify philosophical curiosity 

 to know the minute discrimination of local symptoms during life, 

 or the nice distinctions in the morbid appearances after death, we 

 gain thereby no curative remedy ; and although we should be able to 

 ascertain whether the peritonaeum of the duodenum, of the jejunum, 

 or of any part of the abdominal contents be inflamed, it leads to no 

 difference of treatment. If the lungs be thickened or compacted 

 like liver, or are tuberculated, what avails the knowledge when it 

 does not lead to anything which can soften the one or resolve the 

 other? A great deal of valuable time is lost in making those nice 

 distinctions which would be better employed in endeavouring to 

 discover means to counteract the causes which lead to the con- 

 sequences. 



It is far from my intention to insinuate that these studies are 

 altogether useless, that the knowledge of the condition of morbid 

 parts is no acquisition, though certainly not one of that utility which 

 is generally believed, and I deprecate the ultra-importance attached 

 these pursuits. 



In certain diseased symptoms, within the thorax for example, 

 arising from a collection of fluid there, we know that digitalis, 

 calomel, squill, neutral salts, &c. will often relieve the patient 

 of this morbid load ; but unless we had had a previous knowledge 

 that medicines of this class counteracted the effects which these 

 symptoms indicate, no morbid dissections, however numerous, dis- 

 covering effused fluids, could have suggested any medicinal means for 

 their removal. Morbid dissections, by discovering diseased structure, 

 will often mechanically and beautifully explain and illustrate the 

 phaenomena which had occurred some time previous to dissolution ; 

 but they afford us, in general, little or no information of the causes 

 and nature of the symptoms which lead to the effects producing 

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