Objective Clinical Methods

Abstract

A NEW and remarkably ingenious example of the objective clinical methods which are constantly being developed in modern medicine and surgery is the phono-electrocardioscope designed by Dr. G. E. Donovan (The Lancet, 500, April 15, 1944), which permits simultaneous direct visual recording of the phonocardiogram, electrocardiogram and sphygmogram, with amplified auscultation through a binaural stethoscope; in addition, photographic records can be made. The expense of such instruments and the difficulty of producing them in sufficient numbers will prevent all but a few workers from using them, but it is worth remembering that some of them can be applied to the study of the normal animal as well as to the sick animal for whose relief they were invented. The electrocardiograph and the techniques of radiography, cystoscopy and duodenal intubation are examples of objective clinical techniques which can be, and are being, used by anatomists and biologists for studies which have no connexion with disease. The cystoscope or the ophthalmoscope, for example, need not always be used for the study of the bladder or the eye. The principle on which such instruments are constructed can be applied to other things. If an instrument allows you to look into the bladder of a man, it may be used also for seeking out the death watch beetle underneath a floor, and it is being used in this way by Prof. Bayley Butler in Dublin; and the biologist, the medical man and the veterinarian can all use modern methods of studying the fluids and soft tissues of the body and so demonstrate that they are all students in the same field of inquiry.