Page:The Thruston speech on the progress of medicine 1880.djvu/18

14 then, secondly, with regard to those complications or sequelæ which are apt, as a result of subsequent development, to follow in their train. Such a division helps us to appreciate what an enormous number of so-called diseases originate in a previous attack of more or less acute character; and further it should act as an incentive to the physician to pay all the greater attention to that period which immediately follows any of those acute attacks, which so frequently, as their result, leave some slight spot of organic change, the rapid growth of which leads to irreparable degeneration of tissue, ending sooner or later in the death of the sufferer. We have this point brought most prominently before us by comparing the opinions as held in the present day on such a subject as general dropsy, with those which we may gather to have been held, I may say, almost within our own memory. We find dropsy spoken of as a disease, a disease to be treated on definite principles, but it is indeed but very lately that we