Paris medicine's golden rule was 'read little, see much, do much'

Paris medicine, dubbed as anatomico-pathological, built upon the tissue pathology developed by Bichat. In place of symptoms or organs, tissues assumed primacy, regarded as basic building-blocks and as pathological sites.

The nuances of this or that patient were brushed aside, for such symptoms were now viewed as mere foam on the surface of what Jean Louis Alibert called 'the uncharted ocean of diseases.'
‘The sick person has become a thing’ the German physician Robert Volz noted in the 19th century

Bichat told doctors what to do: ‘You may take notes for twenty years from morning to night at the bedside of the sick, and all will be to you only a confusion of symptoms . . . a train of incoherent phenomena.’ But start cutting bodies open and ‘this obscurity will soon disappear’. Here was the medicine of the all-powerful gaze.

Medical training had therefore to be a matter of drilling students to interpret the sights, sounds and smells of disease – in short, a morbid education of the senses. Clinical judgement was the elucidation of what trained senses perceived, its end being to designate disease.

— The Greatest Benefit to Mankind, by Roy Porter

أما روي بورتر، فهذا شكو كتاب ألزمه عن تاريخ الطب، لازم لو هو كاتبه، لو ذاكريه بصفته مصدر بالكتاب...

بالمناسبة، اغلب مبادئ طب باريس ما زالت ذات فائدة اليوم لأن الطب والتعليم الطبي الحديث كلها متأثرة بيه

Using numerical methods and probability, Pierre Louis (1787–1872) revealed that it made no difference to the outcome of pneumonia whether [bloodletting] was performed early or late, or whether large or small amounts of blood were let; in fact, nothing had much effect. Likewise, no therapies did much good with various fevers. Louis had sometimes been dubbed a therapeutic nihilist; his early medical experiences in Russia had indeed taught him the sobering fact that medicine rarely cured. Corvisart mused that medicine ‘is not the art of curing diseases’. Leading his editor to call his works ‘a meditation on death’.

— The Greatest Benefit to Mankind

One day I will find the right words, and they will be simple.

*كأنك بالانتباه تُطيل عمر الشيء*

It's a synthetic opioid used as an analgesic for severe pain (as in cancer patients)