THE SURGEONS AS LIFE-SAVERS

Taranaki Daily News, Volume LII, Issue 102, 27 May 1909, Page 4

THE SURGEONS AS LIFE-SAVERS

Mr. W. Keen, one of the most famous of American surgeons 1 , gives a striking review of what recent surgical.Jjfogress has done to save life. Sunl'ifiing up what the irivuds of experimental research have done, he says: — "(1) They have discovered antiseptic surgery, and so made possible the wonderful results' of modern surgery, i'o complete his beneficent work, Lord Lister was compelled to go to France by reason oi the stringency of the English anti-vivisection laws.

"(2) They have made possible practically all modern abdominal surgery, including operations on the stomach, :n----lestiues, liver, gall bladder, pancreas, spleen, kidneys, etc. "(3) They have made possible all the modern surgery of the brain. "(4) They iiav« demonstrated how lockjaw spreads from the woinid; how sometimes it can be arrested and cured; and, stilt better, how it can be prevented, so that practically tetanus has been banished from surgical operations. •'(5) They have reduced the ileathrate in compound fractures from (io per cent, to less than 1 'per cent. "((I) 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 rcve", •*(S) They have made possible the cure of nearly all cases of hydrophobia. "(!)) They have cut down the mortality in diphtheria in New York City alone from 158 dc.aths per 100,000 in 11)04 to 38 per 100,000 in 1005, and practically the same story is told all over the world.

•'(10) Hy the use of the serum recently discovered by l ? lex»pr at the Rockefeller Institute they have changed the mortality in cerebrospinal meningiti? from 75 per cent., and even 90 per cent., to 3ft per cent., or less. "(11) They hav c shown the cause «>f acute tetany after operation for goitre, so that it now can be prevented. "(I*2) 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 otic in every hundred.

"(13) They have shown tin? cause ind j the method of proposition and or pf-! vention of th ( . deadly malaria which devastates whole regions and armies. Its extinction is only a matter of tinv\ "(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-stomj of all modem progress* in the treatment of tuberculosis.

"(15) They have enormously benefited animals by discovering the causes and the dangers of tuberculosis, Texas fever, anthrax, glanders, hog cholera, and other infectious diseases of animals, thus na'bling us to combat them more, successfully or H'ven to prevent them. "This paper is a record of only a few of the 'wonderful achievements of modern surgery in human beings which have resulted chiefly from experiments on the lower animals," adds Dr. Keen.

"That clinical investigation—that is. investigation I>y observation at the bedside—has 'been of value, no one doubts: tut had ive been restricted to clinical observation only, not a tithe of ,the progress recorded would have been made. I scarcely know anything more touching than the story told nie by Dr. Carrel of a boy who wrote to him offering himgulf for experiments of any kind if by so doivig he could obtain a pension for his mother. Not long since I also received a similar letter from a doctor who was afflicted with a disease 'which he knew was mortal. He wrote me saying that he was willi/g to submit lo any operation, however painful, without any anaesthetic, if it could be of ai... use to humanity.

"Moreover, this progress is not only in surgery, hut in medicine; and doctors have been in the forefront in sacrificing their lives, sometimes by accident, sometimes voluntarily, in order to achieve these splendid results. Doctors have died by diphtheria, hy plague, by infection of various kinds, have slept in t'ic blothcs and in the beds of yellow-ievfr patients in order to discover whether the fever was spread hy these means, and have offered up -even Jlieir lives in order to prove that vellow-fever was caused solely by the mosquito, ami thus clinch the proof that was needed m order that this dreadful scourge might 'be eliminated; a scourge which has' cost a holocaust of lives and millions of dollars wen in the United States alone."