Word Finder - physician

definition

A practitioner of physic, i.e. a specialist in internal medicine, especially as opposed to a surgeon; a practitioner who treats with medication rather than with surgery.

definition

A medical doctor trained in human medicine.

He is private physician to the Queen of Spain.

The mother is a physician and a brilliant woman, he says.

He started as a physician and practised for some years, kept a school and studied astronomy.

After resting at Newport, he went for the winter to be under the care of a physician at Saranac Lake in the Adirondacks for the winter.

His father was a physician who emigrated from Denmark in 1864.

Whether he was a practising physician or not has been a matter of controversy.

Returning to London he supported himself for some time by practising as a physician.

His father was a physician, who on embracing the doctrines of the Reformation became a Protestant minister, and to escape persecution settled at Bern, in Switzerland.

He became secretary to the governor of Granada, and later physician and vizier to the Mohad caliph, Abu Ya`qub Yusuf.

From his writings it would appear that the offices of physician, surgeon and apothecary were already considered as distinct professions.

The tobacco plant itself was first brought to Europe in 1558 by Francisco Fernandes, a physician who had been sent by Philip II of Spain to investigate the products of Mexico.

Hoffmann the earliest mention of destillatio per descensum occurs in the writings of Aetius, a Greek physician who flourished at about the end of the 5th century.

In September 1689 he reached Batavia; spent the following winter in studying Javanese natural history; and in May 1690 set out for Japan as physician to the embassy sent yearly to that country by the Dutch.

He studied medicine and became a physician, but his attention was early directed also to geometrical studies.

He was much engaged at the same time in remedying smoking chimneys, and as late as 1785 wrote to Jan Ingenhousz, physician to the emperor of Austria, on chimneys and draughts; smoking street lamps he remedied by a simple contrivance.

He is only to meddle in his own vocation; and to remember that his office is only to be the physician's cook."

Decrepit prisoners were formerly leased, but in 1906 the lease excluded such as were thought unfit by the state prison physician.

If further selection be made from the large body of miscellaneous poems, the comic poem on the physician Andro Kennedy may stand out as one of the best contributions to medieval Goliardic literature; The Two Mariit Wemen and the Wedo, as one of the richest and most effective pastiches in the older alliterative style, then used by the Scottish Chaucerians for burlesque purposes; Done is a battell on the Dragon Blak, for religious feeling expressed in melodious verse; and the well-known Lament for the Makaris.

The first grand characteristic of Hippocratic medicine is the high conception of the duties and status of the physician, shown in the celebrated "Oath of Hippocrates" and elsewhere - equally free from the mysticism of a priesthood and the vulgar pretensions of a mercenary craft.

The second great quality is the singular artistic skill and balance with which the Hippocratic physician used such materials and tools as he possessed.

Here we recognize the true Greek But this artistic completeness was closely connected with the third cardinal virtue of Hippocratic medicine - the clear recognition of disease as being equally with life a process governed by what we should now call natural laws, which could be known by observation, and which indicated the spontaneous and normal direction of recovery, by following which alone could the physician succeed.

The duty of the physician was to foresee these changes, "to assist or not to hinder them," so that "the sick man might conquer the disease with the help of the physician."

The first Greek physician whose name is preserved as having migrated to Rome was Archagathus, who came over from the Peloponnesus in 218 B.C.; but there were probably others before him.

It was not meant for the physicians, and was certainly little read by them, as Celsus is quoted by no medical writer, and when referred to by Pliny, is spoken of as an author not a physician.

Of Pliny, another encyclopaedic writer, a few words must be said, though he was not a physician.

For some centuries the methodic school was popular at Rome, and produced one physician, Caelius Aurelianus, who must be pronounced, next to Celsus, the most considerable of the Latin medical writers.

The earliest is Oribasius (326-403), whose date and position are fixed by his being the friend and court physician of Julian the Apostate.

Either to the 10th or the 11th century must be referred the name of another Arabian physician who has also attained the position of a classic, Abu'l Qasiin or Abulcasis, of El-Zahra, near Cordova, in Spain.

Gerard of Cremona, a physician of Toledo (1114-1187), made translations, it is said by command of Barbarossa, from Avicenna and others.

Of these two physicians the first probably, the latter certainly, was educated and practised abroad, but John Gaddesden (1280?-1361), the author of Rosa anglica seu Practica medicinae (between 1305 and 1317), was a graduate in medicine of Merton College, Oxford, and court physician.

An English physician, William Cole (1635-1716), is also usually ranked with them.

One of the most elaborate developments of the system was that of Archibald Pitcairne (1652-1713), a Scottish physician who became professor at Leiden, to be spoken of hereafter.

The great sensational philosopher was a thoroughly trained physician, and practised privately.

An important academical position was, on the other hand, one of the reasons why a physician not very different in his way of thinking from the English physicians of the age of Queen Anne was able to take a far more predominant position in the medical world.

The Swiss physician, Theophile Bonet (1620-1689) had published his Sepulcretum in 1679; and observations of post mortem appearances had been made by Montanus, P. Tulp, Raymond Vieussens, A.M.

In America the system was enthusiastically adopted by a noted physician, Benjamin Rush (1745-1813), of Philadelphia, who was followed by a considerable school.

A physician of Plymouth, John Huxham (1694-1768), made researches on epidemic fevers, in the spirit of Sydenham and Hippocrates, which are of the highest importance.

One novelty, however, of the first importance is due to a Vienna physician of the period, Leopold Auenbrugger (1722-1809), the inventor of the method of recognizing diseases of the chest by percussion.

William Hunter (1718-1783) was known in London as a brilliant teacher of anatomy and successful obstetric physician; his younger brother and pupil, John Hunter (1728-1793), was also a teacher of anatomy, and practised as a surgeon.

If at first in the 18th century, and in the earlier 19th, the discoveries in this branch of medical knowledge had a certain isolation, due perhaps to the prepossessions of the school of Sydenham, they soon became the property of the physician, and were brought into co-ordination with the clinical phenomena of disease.

It is obvious that the results of such advances prescribe for the clinical physician methods which cannot be pursued without expert assistance; a physician engaged in busy prac- Spec;a;ism.

That the division of labour, which may seem to disintegrate the calling of the physician, really unites it, is well seen in the clinical laboratories which were initiated in the later 19th century, and which are destined to a great future.

Yet on the whole, even from the beginning, the revolt was useful in that it shook the position of the "learned physician," who took a literary, fastidious and meditative rather than an experimental interest in his profession, and, as in great part a descendant of the humanists, was never in full sympathy with experimental science.

But bodily defect is largely a result of evil circumstances, in the prevention of which the physician is not unsuccessfully engaged, and the growth of sympathy means a stronger cement of the social structure.

By the discovery of the bacillus of tubercle, the physician has been enabled to piece together a long and varied list of maladies under several names, such as scrofula and lupus, many of them long suspected to be tuberculous, but now known to belong to the series.

In the treatment of effusions into the pleura and, though with less advantage, of pericardial effusions, direct mechanical interference was practised by one physician and another, till these means of attaining rapid and complete cure took their places as indispensable, and were extended from thoracic diseases to those of the abdominal and other inner parts formerly beyond the reach of direct therapeutics.

We have said that this advance is often quoted, not very wisely, to signify that in modern progress "medicine" has fallen behind surgery - as if the art of the physician were not one and indivisible.

The first recognition of a disease may be at a necropsy, but then usually by irresponsible pathologists; it is another matter when the physician himself comes under rebuke for failing to seize a way to cure, while the chance remained to him, by section of the abdomen during life.

This theory was supported by the French physician Jean Ray, who showed also that in the cases of tin and lead there was a limit to the increase in weight.

Foreign artists worked for him at high wages; from Athens he brought Democedes, the greatest physician of the age, at an exceptional salary.