Page:The Thruston speech on the progress of medicine 1880.djvu/20

16 period he now knows so well he has to apprehend the danger of subsequent complications.

We can only now take this one example as an indication of the importance of closely studying the natural history of disease as is to be gathered from an examination of its consequences. Undoubtedly one of the most important steps which medicine has made in its development, is the recognition of the difference between disease itself and those symptoms which may be caused as the result of such disease. We shall find that in most, if not in all, of the older writers on medicine, the treatment of the physician was directed towards the alleviation of those prominent symptoms, which, then not so much looked upon as symptoms, were only recognized as the main cause of the attack. Such a method of treatment had the manifold disadvantage of, in many cases, masking the true nature of the complaint by the very action of the physician himself, who, in his endeavours to but relieve the distress of his patient, gave but