The Natural History of Disease

doi:10.1136/bmj.a185

BMJ 2008;336:1313 (7 June), doi:10.1136/bmj.a185

Views & Reviews

Medical Classics

The Natural History of Disease

Leonard Sinclair, emeritus consultant paediatrician, Chelsea and Westminster Hospital, London

Drls@gotadsl.co.uk

The first 150 words of the full text of this article appear below.

John Ryle came from the school of master clinicians who walkedthe wards and tended the needs of patients (at Guy’s Hospital,London). He was a physician who listened but was also notedfor his clinical research on gastric function. "Ryle’stube" was for many years the eponymous name for that tube usedfor emptying the stomach and for gastric lavage.

His mentor was Arthur Hurst, the doyen of gastroenterologistsin the 1920s, and he dedicated this book to him. It was writtenat a time when Ryle had accumulated much clinical experienceand was under the burden of a large private practice. He hadalready also contributed widely to the literature, but mostpapers were written especially for Guy’s Hospital Reports,and several of the chapters are from that quietly successfuljournal. Thus when academia beckoned him to the chair of physicin Cambridge in 1935 he was . . . [Full text of this article]