6 2 o THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



ceased, who would have dared to suggest that the entire limb of a liv- 

 ing man should be deprived of its blood during the time occupied by 

 a tedious operation ? 



Then, with regard to the means of permanently arresting the es- 

 cape of blood from the wounded vessels. We have no longer a recep- 

 tacle for blood ; indeed, the handful of sawdust on the floor that was 

 fashionable when I began medicine is no longer used. John Bell, 

 after giving a graphic and fearful account of the terrors of haemor- 

 rhage, says: "Is not this fear of haemorrhagy always uppermost in the 

 mind of the young surgeon ? Were this one danger removed, would 

 he not go forward in his profession almost without fear ? " I do not 

 think this fear ever crosses the mind of the young surgeon now, so 

 rare are deaths from external haemorrhage. I have never seen one 

 death from such loss of blood in the twenty years that have passed 

 since I first commenced to study medicine. Why has the dread of 

 bleeding ceased to chill the heart of the surgeon when entering on an 

 operation? Vivisection has not done all, but it has done much to 

 help us to attain to this degree of excellence in our present methods. 



The use of the ligature can be traced so far back in the history of 

 medicine that it is impossible to say whether it was first used upon 

 man or animals. Very definite accounts of it occur in the writings of 

 the Arabians of the tenth or twelfth century. Although its value, or 

 rather its great convenience, in military surgery was recognized and 

 extolled by Ambroise Pare, the inestimable value of the ligature re- 

 mained unknown in general pi'actice for nearly a hundred years after 

 his time. This was, no doubt, partly on account of the fact that ex- 

 periment was not used to test its efficacy and mode of action until 

 comparatively recently. By vivisections the chief errors in its appli- 

 cation were by slow degrees removed, and now we rest almost exclu- 

 sively on the improved method of tying arteries as the means of 

 arresting the flow of blood from a recent wound. First of all, the 

 nerves used to be included in the ligature. Vivisection showed the 

 folly of thus attempting to confine the animal spirits, or nervous fluid, 

 and practice proved that thus tying the nerves always caused excru- 

 ciating agony, and often gave rise to fatal spasms (tetanus), which 

 made ligature to be dreaded even by its warmest advocates. In the 

 second place, the wide ligatures which were made of soft material 

 and lightly tied over corks, etc., often failed to check the bleeding. 

 Dr. John Thomson, of Edinburgh, was among the first who made ex- 

 periments on this subject, and I believe much of the credit given to 

 Jones really belongs to him. Following the precepts taught by 

 Thomson, Jones also made numerous experiments on animals. He 

 found that a hard, thin ligature, applied so as to cut the elastic inner 

 coats and leave the tough outer wall of the vessel uninjured, was 

 much more surely followed by a deposit of " coagulable lymph," and 

 by more satisfactory occlusion of the vessel, than when one or several 



