APPLICABILITY OF EXPERIMENTAL RESULTS TO THE SHOCK PROBLEM IN MAN

Abstract

It has become traditional in this section for the chairman to offer some sort of overture to our proceedings. Since the symposium today stresses the services that physiology has rendered to medicine, and since these contributions have accrued largely through animal experimentation, I have chosen to discuss the applicability of results so gained to the shock problem in man. The statement is frequently made that experiments rarely, if ever, reduplicate diseases in man, and that therefore only those deductions are applicable which are derived from experiments which simulate clinical conditions, and only those interpretations are valid which agree with clinical observations. In the experimental study of shock, experimenters have been criticized and have criticized one another in the use of unnatural and uncomparable methods. To be frank, too many laboratory investigators have studied shock who have never seen a case clinically and hence are perhaps unable to judge the similarity