Clinical Examination of Patients with Notes on Laboratory Diagnosis

A post-war clinician's manual that paired the classical methods of bedside examination with the rising laboratory investigation culture of the 1950s. Written for house officers and senior students taking their first steps on the wards.

The volume was co-written by John Ronald Forbes, a Guy's-trained physician then in consultant practice in North Wales, with William N. Mann, who was head of medicine at Guy's Hospital. Its structure follows the order of the classical clerking — history-taking, general inspection, the regional examinations of head, neck, chest, abdomen and limbs, and the neurological screen — and then turns to the laboratory tests then becoming routinely available, showing how their findings should be recorded alongside bedside signs in a single integrated case write-up.

The text appeared in the years immediately after the founding of the National Health Service, when the volume of routine biochemistry, haematology and microbiology requested from hospital wards was rising sharply. The Arnold list of clinical-method manuals supplied a generation of house officers with the working vocabulary for that change, and the Forbes and Mann volume was one of the imprint's principal contributions.