Page:The Harveian oration, 1893.djvu/54

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Again, we can most of us remember using very imperfect physiological knowledge to fix, more or less successfully, the locality of an organic lesion in the brain. I also remember such attempts being described as a mere scientific game, which could only be won after the player was beaten, since when the accuracy of diagnosis was established, its object was already lost; but who would say this now, when purely physiological research and purely diagnostic success have led to one of the most brilliant achievements of practical Medicine, the operative treatment of organic diseases of the brain?

Morbid Anatomy not only teaches us what lesions we have to discover, but also their true pathological relation. We learn that every disease does not affect every part of the body. If we make a horizontal list of all the organs and tissues, and a vertical one of all the known morbid changes, according to Rokitansky’s laborious and