Internists

Internal medicine or general medicine (in Commonwealth nations) is the medical specialty dealing with the prevention, diagnosis, and treatment of adult diseases. Physicians specializing in internal medicine are called internists, or physicians (without a modifier) in Commonwealth nations. Internists are skilled in the management of patients who have undifferentiated or multi-system disease processes. Internists care for hospitalized and ambulatory patients and may play a major role in teaching and research.

Because internal medicine patients are often seriously ill or require complex investigations, internists do much of their work in hospitals. Internists often have subspecialty interests in diseases affecting particular organs or organ systems.

Internal medicine is also a specialty within clinical pharmacy and veterinary medicine.

Historically, some of the oldest traces of internal medicine can be traced from Ancient India and Ancient China. Earliest texts about internal medicine are the Ayurvedic anthologies of Charaka.

Internal medicine physicians have practiced both in clinics and in hospitals, often in the same day. Pressures on time have led to many internal medicine physicians to choose one practice setting, who may choose to practice only in the hospital, as a "hospitalist", or only in an outpatient clinic, as a primary care physician.

The term internal medicine originates from the German term Innere Medizin, popularized in Germany in the late 19th century to describe physicians who combined the science of the laboratory with the bedside clinical care of patients. Internal medicine delved into underlying pathological causes of symptoms and syndromes by use of laboratory investigations. In contrast, physicians in previous generations, such as the 17th century physician Thomas Sydenham, who is known as the father of English medicine or "the English Hippocrates", had developed nosology (the study of diseases) via the clinical approach to diagnosis and management, by careful bedside study of the natural history of diseases and their treatment while eschewing dissection of corpses and scrutiny of the internal workings of the body, and thus anatomical pathology and laboratory studies, in considering the internal mechanisms and causes of symptomsGiovanni Battista Morgagni, an Italian anatomist of the 18th century, is considered the father of anatomical pathology. The 19th century saw the rise of internal medicine that combined the clinical approach with use of investigations. Many early-20th century American physicians studied medicine in Germany and brought this medical field to the United States. Thus, the name "internal medicine" was adopted in imitation of the existing German term.

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