The Natural History of Disease

Abstract

This volume is made up of a collection of thirty-four papers, the majority of which, as the author tells us, have appeared previously in medical journals of the past ten years and are based on addresses to medical societies or clinical lectures given at Guy's Hospital. They are concerned more particularly with symptomatology and the portraiture of disease than with pathologic changes or diagnosis by means of laboratory or instrumental aids. The theme of the book is stated on page 22. "There is no disease of which a fuller or additional description does not remain to be written; there is no symptom as yet adequately explored." It will be noted that this is much the same idea that was so strenuously set forth by Mackenzie, that research ought not to be entrusted entirely to the laboratory worker or the full time hospital man; that the active practitioner has a rich