JOHN COLLINS WARREN 



PROFESSOR OF SURGERY, HARVARD MEDICAL SCHOOL, 

 SURGEON, MASSACHUSETTS GENERAL HOSPITAL 



DR. J. C. WARREN said that vivisection had been an im- 

 portant factor in the wonderful changes that have taken 

 place in surgery during his professional career. When he 

 began practice in 1869 there was a frightful amount of hos- 

 pital disease in the surgical wards due to the infection of 

 wounds. Twenty-five years before, anesthesia had been 

 discovered, and this had given a sudden impetus to surgery 

 for which science was not prepared. There was in con- 

 sequence a greater amount of hospital gangrene, erysipe- 

 las, and pyemia than there had ever been before in civil 

 practice. 



Pasteur's researches gave Lister the hint as to how to 

 combat this. Lister's first attempts in the antiseptic treat- 

 ment of wounds were very crude, and it was only after 

 years of careful investigation of the traumatic infective 

 diseases by experimental research with animals that the 

 system was perfected and these diseases banished from 

 our hospitals. 



Dr. Warren said that he used experiments on animals 

 to some extent in teaching. It was necessary, for instance, 

 to show the students the nature of a gunshot wound of the 

 abdomen and the chest, otherwise they would be unable 

 properly to appreciate the principles of treatment of those 

 conditions. To be competent to find and sew up a wound 

 of the intestines it was necessary for the student to have 

 such personal experience. 



