Word Finder - physicians

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.

There were physicians who understood the use of herbs, and must be rewarded when their help was invited.

But the priests of Asclepius were not physicians.

These resources certainly include family, friends, others with Gaucher disease, physicians, and genetic counselors.

The influence of these great academies of the 17th century on the progress of zoology was precisely to effect that bringing together of the museum-men and the physicians or anatomists which was needed for further development.

That philosopher and several of his successors were physicians, but we do not know in what relation they stood to later medical schools.

It follows from what has been said that prognosis, or the art of foretelling the course and event of the disease, was a strong point with the Hippocratic physicians.

The reputation of Herophilus is attested by the fact that four considerable physicians wrote works about him and his writings, and he is further spoken of with the highest respect by Galen and Celsus.

When Greece was made a Roman province, the number of such physicians who sought their fortunes in Rome must have been very large.

He reversed the Hippocratic maxim "art is long," promising his scholars to teach them the whole of medicine in six months, and had inscribed upon his tomb iaTpovLKc, 7 r, as being superior to all living and bygone physicians.

The conflicts of the opposing schools, and the obvious deficiencies of each, led many physicians to try and combine the valuable parts of each system, and to call themselves eclectics.

Among these were found many of the most eminent physicians of Graeco-Roman times.

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.

He found the medical profession of his time split up into a number of sects, medical science confounded under a multitude of dogmatic systems, the social status and moral integrity of physicians degraded.

But the reputation of Galen grew slowly; he does not appear to have enjoyed any pre-eminence over other physicians of his time, to most of whom he was strongly opposed in opinion.

At the same time the Arabs became acquainted with Indian medicine, and Indian physicians lived at the court of Bagdad.

The work by which he is chiefly known, the celebrated "canon," is an encyclopaedia of medical and surgical knowledge, founded upon Galen, Aristotle, the later Greek physicians, and the earlier Arabian writers, singularly complete and systematic, but is thought not to show the practical experience of its author.

In the 9th century Salernitan physicians were already spoken of, and the city was known as Civitas hippocratica.

Among the writers it may be sufficient to mention here Gariopontus; Copho, who wrote the Anatome porci, a well-known medieval book; Joannes Platearius, first of a family of physicians bearing the same name, whose Practica, or medical compendium, was afterwards several times printed; and Trotula, believed to be the wife of the last-named.

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.

The movement of reform started, of necessity, with scholars rather than practising physicians - more precisely with a group of learned men, whom we may be permitted, for the sake of a name, to call the medical humanists, equally enthusiastic in the cause of letters and of medicine.

Since a knowledge of Greek was still confined to a small body of scholars, and a still smaller proportion of physicians, the first task was to translate the Greek classics into Latin.

To this work several learned physicians, chiefly Italians, applied themselves with great ardour.

Symphorien Champier (Champerius or Campegius) of Lyons (1472-1539), a contemporary of Rabelais, and the patron of Servetus, wrote with fantastic enthusiasm on the superiority of the Greek to the Arabian physicians, and possibly did something to enlist in the same cause the two far greater men just mentioned.

It was probably most so, and earliest, in the schools of Italy and in those of England, where the London College of Physicians might be regarded as an offshoot of the Italian schools.

In the first place the 15th and 16th centuries were notable for the outbreak of certain epidemic diseases, which were unknown to the old physicians.

Many of the leading English physicians of the 18th century studied there; Gerard Van Swieten (1700-1772), a pupil of Boerhaave, transplanted the latter's method of teaching to Vienna, and founded the noted Vienna school of medicine.

In this he claimed to have made the most salutary reform because all physicians from Hippocrates had treated diseases by depletion and debilitating measures with the object of curing by elimination.

The roll of the College of Physicians does not furnish many distinguished names.

Starting from these men arose a school of physicians who endeavoured to give to the study of symptoms the same precision as belonged to anatomical observations, and by the combination of both methods made a new era in clinical medicine.

The combination of clinical and anatomical research led, as in the hands of the great French physicians, to important discoveries by English investigators.

Several of these physicians were also eminent for their clinical teaching - an art in which Englishmen had up till then been greatly deficient.

Although many names of scarcely less note might be mentioned among the London physicians of the early part of the century, we must pass them over to consider the progress of medicine in Scotland and Ireland.

Turning to Ireland, it should be said that the Dublin school in this period produced two physicians of the highest distinction.

In the other German schools, though some great names might be found, as Moritz Heinrich Romberg (1795-1873), the founder of the modern era in the study of nervous diseases, the general spirit was scholastic and the result barren till the teaching of one man, whom the modern German physicians generally regard as the regenerator of scientific medicine in their country, made itself felt.

Hippocrates had no opportunity of verification by necropsy, and Sydenham ignored pathology; yet the clinical features of many but recently described diseases, such, for example, as that named after Graves, and myxoedema, both associated with perversions of the thyroid gland, lay as open to the eye of physicians in the past as to our own.

Thus it was, partly because the habit of acceptance of authority, waning but far from extirpated, dictated to the clinical observer what he should see; partly because the eye of the clinical observer lacked that special training which the habit and influence of experimental verification alone can give, that physicians, even acute and practised physicians, failed to see many and many a symptomatic series which went through its evolutions conspicuously enough, and needed for its appreciation no unknown aids or methods of research, nor any further advances of pathology.

With the melting of the ice the more daring spirits dashed into the new current with such ardour that for them all traditions, all institutions, were thrown into hotchpot; even elderly and sober physicians took enough of the infection to liberate their minds, and, in the field of the several diseases and in that of post-mortem pathology, the hollowness of classification by superficial resemblance, the transitoriness of forms, and the flow of processes, broke upon the view.

Discovery in these various directions then led physicians to regard fever and inflammation not as separable entities, but as fluctuating symptomgroups, due to swervings of function from the normal balance under contingent forces.

Surgeons, physicians, oculists, laryngologists, gynaecologists, neurologists and the rest, all are working in allotments of the same field, and combining to a common harvest.

Those physicians who had occupied themselves in the study of the exacter sciences, or more closely or more exclusively of the wreckage of the post mortem room, were the strongest men of this school, whether in England or abroad.

Sufferers from mental disease are still regarded too much as troublesome persons to be hidden away in humane keeping, rather than as cases of manifold and obscure disease, to be studied and treated by the undivided attention of physicians of the highest skill.

That certain Fellows of the College of Physicians (especially in gynaecology) have personally taken operative procedures in hand is some good omen that in time the unreal and mischievous schism between medicine and surgery may be bridged over.

The university is governed by a senate consisting of a chancellor, chairman of convocation and 54 members, whose appointment is shared by the Crown, convocation, the Royal Colleges of Physicians and of Surgeons, the Inns of Court, the Law Society, the London County Council, City Corporation, City and Guilds Institute, University and King's Colleges and the faculties.

The Royal College of Physicians is in Pall Mall East, and the Royal College of Surgeons is in Lincoln's Inn Fields.

But Don Carlos insisted on sending his own physicians, and in their hands the general died on the 24th of June 1835 - not without suspicion of poison.

The care of the health of the working force should be entrusted to competent mine physicians, thoroughly familiar with the conditions under which the miners work, and with the special diseases to which they are subject.

His ancestors had been celebrated as physicians for several generations, and his son was afterwards held by the Arabians to be even more eminent in his profession than Avenzoar himself.

At Gunde-Shapur in this region " sugar was prepared with art " about the time of the Arab conquest, 3 and manufacture on a large scale was carried on at Shuster, Sus and Askar-Mokram throughout the middle ages.4 It has been plausibly conjectured that the art of sugar refining, which the farther East learned from the Arabs, was developed by the famous physicians of this region, in whose pharmacopoeia sugar had an important place.

Many of the Arabian philosophers were also physicians and wrote on medicine.

In the sierras they have the same general occupations, but there are no social bars to their advancement, and they become lawyers, physicians, priests, merchants, officials and capitalists.