Mémoire concernant une espèce de colique, observée sur les vaisseaux : lû a l'assemblée publique de la Faculté de médecine de Paris, tenue le 1.er septembre 1783

Joseph Jacques de Gardanne

Verlag: A Paris : De l'imprimerie royale, 1783

In-8° broché, 22 pages. Jacques-Joseph Gardanne (1726-1786) fut docteur-régent de la Faculté de médecine de Paris. Pierre-Charles-Alexandre Louis (14 April 1787 - 22 August 1872[2]) was a French physician, clinician and pathologist known for his studies on tuberculosis, typhoid fever, and pneumonia, but Louis's greatest contribution to medicine was the development of the "numerical method", forerunner to epidemiology and the modern clinical trial. Louis was born in Ay, Champagne, the son of a wine merchant. He grew up during the French Revolution and initially thought to study law, later switching to medicine, graduating in 1813. His initial studies were in Reims, but he completed them in Paris. After graduation, Louis accompanied the Compte de Saint-Priest, a family friend, to Russia, travelling with the Compte for several years before settling in the Ukrainian city of Odessa in 1816. He maintained a successful private practice for four years, receiving the honorary title of physician from the Tsar. However, in 1820 an outbreak of diphtheria forced him to recognize the inadequacy of his medical knowledge. He returned to Paris where he worked, initially without pay, at a hospital for seven years, collecting the case histories of thousands of patients and performing hundreds of autopsies. He eventually wrote studies on the treatment of tuberculosis and typhoid fever, and produced the "numerical method" for evaluating the effectiveness of therapies. In the 19th century, an influential theory was proposed by French physician François-Joseph-Victor Broussais, that fevers were the result of inflammation of the organs, and bloodletting was an effective treatment for any fever.[5] Louis disagreed, publishing a paper in 1828 to that fact (expanded in 1834 to a book-length treatise in the American Journal of the Medical Sciences entitled "An essay on clinical instruction"), which demonstrated that the use of bloodletting for pneumonia was ineffective. Louis' approach was strongly resisted by doctors at the time, who were unwilling to wait for tests to determine if current treatments were effective, or discard treatments if they were found ineffective. Gradually Louis' methods gained acceptance as doctors began recognizing the "numerical method" added objectivity to treatment approaches and improved outcomes. The "numerical method" involved the use of averages of groups of patients with the same illness to determine what should be done with individual cases of that illness. As part of the study, Louis emphasized the importance of the similarity of patients beyond mere disease, and attempted to account for factors such as age of patients in different treatment groups, diet, severity of illness and other treatments used beyond bloodletting. Louis also emphasized the importance of population (rather than individual) comparisons in the belief that differencs between individual patients would "average out" in the group, though he failed to grasp the importance of randomization to ensure this. Opponents argued that individual cases were too diverse to be combined into statistically average groups; Louis responded by pointing out even individual cases have commonalities, and by claiming each case is unique, no progress could ever be made within medicine. Bestandsnummer des Verkäufers ASY3507

Bibliografische Details

Titel: Mémoire concernant une espèce de colique, ...
Verlag: A Paris : De l'imprimerie royale
Erscheinungsdatum: 1783
Einband: Couverture souple
Zustand: Très bon
Auflage: Edition originale