14 Biographkal Memoir of' M. Corvisart. 



sions. He is said to have distinguished, at the distance of several 

 beds, the disease of an individual that had just come to the 

 hospital ; and, with respect to the disorganizations of the heart, 

 and great vessels in particular, he had attained to a truly won- 

 derful accuracy of divination. His decisions were irrevocable, 

 like those of destiny. Not only did he predict the fate that 

 awaited each patient, and the period at which the catastrophe 

 was to happen, but he gave, beforehand, the measure of the 

 swellings, dilatations, and contractions of all the parts ; and the 

 opening of the bodies scarcely ever refuted his announcements. 

 The most experienced, it is said, were utterly astonished by 

 them. 



His two principal works, the Treatise on the Diseases of the 

 Heart *, and the Commentary on Auenbrugger, are celebrated 

 testimonies of the manner and genius of M. Corvisart. In the 

 first, the inflammations of the pericardium, the dropsies which 

 fill its cavity, the thickening and attenuation of the walls either 

 of the heart in general, or of each of its cavities, the hardening 

 of its tissue, its ossification, its conversion into fat, the contrac- 

 tion of its orifices, its tumours, its inflammations, and its rup- 

 tures, are presented, together with their melancholy symptoms, 

 and their fatal results, with an order and clearness that nothing 

 in medicine can surpass. This book so occupied the minds of 

 the young physicians who were eager for instruction, and their 

 imagination was so powerfully struck by it, that, for some time, 

 it is said, they saw nothing but diseases of the heart, as at other 

 times they have seen every where gravel, bile, asthenia, or in- 

 flammations. The effect which it would have on the sick would 

 be still more cruel. His epigraph itself, Haret lateri lethalis 

 arundo, tells how disheartening the reading of it is ; but medical 

 books are not made for those who are not physicians ; and it is 

 well that those who are so, should know positively when nothing 

 remains for them to do. This unhappy certainty prevents 

 them at least fron. tormenting their patients with useless reme- 

 dies. 



In the Commentary on Auenbrugger, it is the diseases of 



• Essay on the Diseases and Organic I^esions of tlie Heart and Large 

 Vessels, extracted from the Clinical Lectures of M. Corvisart, and published 

 under his inspection bv M. E. Horeau, 1 vol. 8vo. Paris, 180G, 2d edition. 



