Excerpt from The Clinical Diagnosis of Internal Diseases: General Diagnosis, Infections, Respiratory and Circulatory Systems In View of the enormous advances made in the sciences formerly termed auxiliary to medicine, but now recognized as fundamental for all progress in the healing art, the time would seem ripe for a publication dealing in a simple, practical way with the clinical diagnosis of internal diseases. In the last decade the Viewpoint of internists has to a certain extent been shifted, in that they are now attempting to Visualize clearly the functional pathological processes that are the essence of disease. They are studying, too, the causes - external and internal - of the deviations from the normal met with in disease; and they are no longer content merely with setting up clinical syndromes, or with attempting to prophesy, during life, the anatomical lesions that pathologists will find in the bodies of their patients after death. Control of clinical work by the methods of patho logical anatomy and histology will always be highly desirable; but for the clinical diagnosis of internal diseases today, a knowledge of functional pathology and of its underlying sciences (biophysics and biochemistry) is quite as important as a knowledge of pathological anatomy. Indeed, this substitution of the Viewpoint of functional pathology for that of strue tural pathology in discussions of the principles and in determining the practice of inner medicine represents the most radical departure in our science since Virchow so profoundly influenced it by the introduction of the conceptions of cellular pathology over fifty years ago. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.