RECIPROCAL RELATIONS OF THE CLINIC AND THE LABORATORY IN MEDICINE

Abstract

The clinic has been under obligations to the laboratory since the time of the first post-mortem descriptions of normal organs, and of pathologic changes in organs and tissues. Yet to-day one would pass over the founding of modern medicine by Rokitansky, Cohnheim and Virchow on pathologic and histologic anatomy, to the consideration of the more striking relations of the clinic to bacteriology, parasitology, physiology, physiologic chemistry, experimental therapy and laboratory diagnosis. It is not that pathologic changes in tissues are unimportant, but in the newer fields of research there has been so rapid a development of methods applicable clinically to the accurate diagnosis and to specific therapy and prophylaxis of infective and parasitic diseases, and the correction and regulation of toxic and antitoxic metabolic disorders of a non-invasive nature, that the earlier pathologic investigations must be considered of a former era. The laboratory has forgotten that the original stimulus for