It gave to the clinical field a new structure in which the individual in question was not so much a sick person as the endlessly reproducible pathological fact to he found in all patients suffering in a similar way; in which the plurality of observations was no longer simply a contradiction or confirmation, but a progressive, theoretically endless convergence; in which time was not an unforeseen element that might conceal, and which must bedominated by anticipatory knowledge, but a dimension to he integrated, since it introduces the elements of the series into its own course as so many degrees of certainty.