SURGEONS AS LIFESAVERS.

Manawatu Herald, Volume XXXI, Issue 462, 17 June 1909, Page 2

SURGEONS AS LIFESAVERS.

Mr \V. W. Kkkn, one ol the most famous American surgeons, gives a striking review of what recent surgical progress has done to save life. Summing up what the friends of .experimental research have done, he says:—(i) They have discovered antiseptic surgery, and so made possible the wonderful results of modern surgery. *To complete his beneficent work, Lord Lister was compelled to go to France by reason of the stringency of the English anti-vivisection laws. (2) They have made possible practically all modern abdominal surgery, including operations on the stomach, intestines, liver, gall, bladder, pancreas, spleen, kidneys, etc. (3) They have made possible all the modern surgery of the brain. (4) They have demonstrated how lockjaw spreads from the wound ; how sometimes it can be arrested and cured ; and, still better, how it can be prevented, so that practically tetanus has been banished from surgical operations. (5) They have reduced the death-rate in compound fractures from 65 per cent, to less than one per cent. (6) They have reduced the mortality of ovariotomy from two out of three to two or three out of one hundred. (7) They have abolished yellow fever. (8) They have made possible the cure of nearly all cases of hydrophobia. (9) They have cut down the mortality of diphtheria in New York City alone from 158 deaths per 100,000 in 1894, to 38 per 100,000 in 1905, and practically the same story is told all over the world. (10) By the Vise of the serum recently discovered by Flexner at the Rockfeller Institute they have changed the mortality ip cerebro-spiual meningitis from

75 per cent., and even 90 per cent., to 30 per cent or less. (11) They have shown the cause of acute tetany after operation for goitre, so that it now can be prevented. (12) They have almost completely abolished the dangers of maternity, reducing its death-rate from ten or more mothers out of every hundred to less than one in every hundred. (13) They have shown the cause and the method of propagation and of prevention of the deadly malaria which devastates whole regions and armies. Its extinction is only a matter of time. (14). They have reduced the mortality of tuberculosis by from 30 to 50 per cent., for Koch’s discovery of the tubercle bacillus is the foundation-stone of all modern progress in the treatment of tuberculosis. (15) They have enormously benefited animals by discovering the causes and the damage of tuberculosis, Texas fever, anthrax, glanders, hog cholera, and other infectious diseases of animals, thus enabling us to combat them more successfully or even to prevent them. This paper is a record of only a few of the wonderful achievements of modern surgery.