Document Type : Research Paper
Author
faculty member in IHCS
Abstract
In humoral medicine, the symptoms of many diseases were localized, but from the pathological point of view, the disease was not localized. In the 18th and 19th centuries, by using the anatomo-clinical method, the disease was localized both in terms of clinical manifestations - symptoms and signs - and in terms of pathology. In other words, the relationship between a disease and its pathological cause (anatomical or physiological) was the most important work that clinical medicine did in the late 19th century. In this article, we first examine the philosophical foundations of this method - sensualism and the philosophy of observation - in the atmosphere of those centuries. Then we describe the characteristics of its two main components, i.e., clinical examination and pathological analysis. Although dissection of the human body was common during the Renaissance period, it was not done for the purpose of etiology of diseases. From the 18th century onwards, under the influence of the philosophy of observation, this doctrine was formed that the cause of the disease corresponds to a lesion under the external organs of the body. Therefore, the dissection was a fundamental step towards the pathology of diseases. In this way, the data obtained from detailed clinical examination and pathological analysis formed two important parts of case reports, which are one of the pillars of research and new achievements of clinical medicine. In the last part of the article, we examine the structure and characteristics of these types of reports.
Keywords
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