OUR RECENT DEBTS TO VIVISECTION. 13 



try alone. Is this cruelty ? Let Norfolk, and Memphis, and Pensa- 

 cola, and New Orleans answer. 



We are all familiar now with the numerous deaths from eating 

 pork infested with trichina. While I was in Berlin, in 1865-'66, a ter- 

 rible epidemic of the then new disease broke out at Hedersleben, a 

 small town in Prussian Saxony. I well remember with what zeal Vir- 

 chow and his assistants immediately investigated the disease, inocu- 

 lated animals with the parasitic worm, studied its natural history, 

 found out that heat killed it, and to-day, as a result of these and other 

 experiments, we all know how to avert its dangers by proper cooking, 

 or to avoid it altogether by the microscope. The value of these ex- 

 periments, both to human life and to commerce, you know even from 

 the daily papers. 



You will find it difficult to make the non-medical public understand 

 nay, you yourselves as yet hardly understand the enormous ad- 

 vance in medicine and surgery brought about by recent researches on 

 inflammation, and by the use of antiseptics. My own professional life 

 only covers twenty -three years, yet in that time I have seen our knowl- 

 edge of inflammation w T holly changed, and the practice of surgery so 

 revolutionized that what would have been impossible audacity in 1862 

 has become ordinary practice in 1885. 



It would seem that so old a process as inflammation would long ago 

 have been known through and through, and that nothing new could 

 be adduced. In 1851, however, Claude-Bernard, by a slight operation, 

 divided the sympathetic nerve in a rabbit's neck and showed its influ- 

 ence on the caliber of the blood-vessels. In 1858 Virchow published 

 his " Cellular Pathology." In 1867 Cohnheim (Virchow's " Archiv ") 

 published his studies on the part that the blood-cells played in inflam- 

 mation as shown in the frog, followed by further papers by Dr. Nor- 

 ris, of this city, Strieker, Von Recklinghausen, Waldeyer, and many 

 others. Already in my lectures I have pointed out to you in detail the 

 advances made by these studies, both in theory and practice. They 

 have brought about an entire reinvestigation of disease, and given us 

 wholly new knowledge as to abscesses, ulceration, gangrene, the or- 

 ganization of clots in wounds, and after operations and ligature of 

 blood-vessels for aneurism, as to thrombosis, and embolism, and paral- 

 ysis, and apoplexy, and a score of other diseases through the diagnosis 

 and treatment of which now runs the silver thread of knowledge in- 

 stead of ignorance. 



With this the brilliant results of the antiseptic system have joined 

 to give us a new surgery. Sir Joseph Lister, to whom we chiefly owe 

 this knowledge, has done more to save hmnan life and diminish human 

 suffering than any other man of the last fifty years. Had he only 

 made practicable the use of animal ligatures, it would have been an 

 untold boon, the value of which can only be appreciated by doctors ; 

 but he has done far more, he has founded a new system of surgery. 



