cessful treatment of
disease, but that one only needed to know empirically how to subdue
symptoms, meaning mainly, if not solely, what we term "subjective"
symptoms--those of which the patient complains, as opposed to those that
we ourselves discover. But the physical examination of the sick, before
extremely meagre in its sphere and restricted in its possibilities, was
destined to expand before many years into the minute and positive
physical diagnosis of the present day.

In the year 1816 a French physician, Rene Theophile Hyacinthe Laennec,
achieved undying fame by publishing to the world an account of his
labors in the application of mediate auscultation and of percussion to
the diagnosis of the diseases of the chest. It is true that no less a
personage than the "Father of Medicine," Hippocrates, is reputed to have
practised succussion as a means of diagnosis; that is, the shaking of a
patient, as one would shake a cask, to ascertain by the occurrence or
non-occurrence of a splashing sound if the person's pleural cavity was
distended partly with water and partly with air. It is probable that
Hippocrates and many others after him carried the physical examination
of the chest still further, for it is difficult to imagine, for example,
that so simple a device as that of thumping a partition to make out the
situation of a joist by the sound evoked should not early have been
applied to the human chest. But, be this as it may, to Laennec belongs
the great credit of having laid a substantial foundation for the
physical diagnosis of the present time, and, more than for laying a
foundation, for constructing a fairly complete edifice. He who should
now undertake to practise general medicine without having first made
himself proficient in the detection and interpretation of the sounds
elicited by auscultation and percussion in diseases of the heart and
lungs would foredoom himself to failure.

It was not until many years later, early in the second half of the
century, that the clinical thermometer came into general use, but it
soon showed most strikingly the superiority of the "instrument of
precision" to the unaided senses of man. Who would think now of trying
to estimate the height of a fever by laying his hand on the patient's
skin, or who, even among the laity, would be satisfied with such a
procedure? "Doubtless," said the present writer in a former publication
("New York Medical Journal," Dec. 29, 1900), "the use of the