ABSTRACT
Diagnostics and therapeutics are important aspects not only of eighteenth-century medicine but also of the wider history of patient-practitioner relationships. It must be emphasised that several techniques of physical examination were well known to the medical men of the eighteenth century. Giovanni Battista Morgagni, took his medical degree in Bologna in 1701 and remained there after graduation, practising physic in three of the city's hospitals. Morgagni's palpation and percussion were accompanied by a visual inspection which scrutinised the whole surface of the body and extended into its orifices. Direct examination was a frequent but not a constant feature of Morgagni's consultative procedure. Morgagni example shows that the exact configuration of physicians' choices and patients' expectations was a cultural variable. Owsei Temkin has argued that much of the novel character of nineteenth-century medicine was the result of a process of cross-fertilisation between surgery and internal physic.
