Dock recorded one of the earliest diagnoses of myocardial infaction in a living patient: "The diagnosis was mymalacia folling coronary sclerosis with secondary pericarditis. This was based on the history of increasing dyspnea and heart pain, without evidence of disease in lungs or kidneys, or other (valvular) diseases of the heart. the history of the acute attack indicating infaction, and the acute onset of pericarditis without other cause." As historian Joshua Leibowitz commented, "this concise diagnosis, logically derived, formulated in scientific terms, and made at the bedside, is one of the first clear-cut and definitive modern contributions to our subject [the history of coronary heart disease]" (quoted by W. Bruce Fye).

When the authors published this book hookworm disease was endemic in the American south, partly because so many people walked in the soil without wearing shoes, so the hookworms entered their body through the soles of their feet.

"From 1899 to 1900 fourth year medical students at the University of Michigan doing their medicine and surgery rotations attended a diagnostic clinic twice a week with George Dock, A.M., M.D., professor of theory and practice of clinical medicine. Dr. Dock had a secretary make a shorthand record of everything that was said at these clinics by Dock himself, the patients, and the students.

The clinics and recording of the interactions continued until the summer of 1908 when Dr. Dock left Michigan for a position at Tulane. The typed transcripts of these sessions fill 6,800 pages. This book is Davenport's distillation and, on occasion, clarification of these documents. In these transcriptions resides not only a view of the practice of academic medicine at the turn of the 20th century, but also a glimpse at one clinician's interpretation of clinical material in his own time" (publisher).