Excerpt from A Practice of Physic, Vol. 2 of 2: Comprising Most of the Diseases Not Treated of in "Diseases of Females, " and "Diseases of Children"

Dr. Forbes, with a view to prevent an exclusive reliance upon the physical Signs presented by percussion and auscultation, says, I think it highly ne cessary, in this place, to caution the student agairi'st yielding too implicit con fidence to auscultation and percussion, as means of diagnosis, to the neglect or exclusion of the more usual methods. It is no doubt true, that these mea sures are of the very first importance in the diagnosis of this, as of almost every other disease of the chest, that in many cases they alone suffice to fix the di agnosis, and that in others this cannot be established without them: at the same time, it is equally certain, that if we attempt, as our general practice, to draw our conclusions, from these signs alone, without reference to the gene ral and local symptoms, we shall frequently not merely fail to attain our obect at all, but we shall run into the risk of falling into errors of the most serious nature. It is only by combining the practice of auscultation with the faithful observation of symptoms, and by studying the results obtained from both sources, with a reference to the pathology of the disease, that we can hope to attain to such a certainty of diagnosis as can satisfy a philosophical mind.

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