44 On Medical Science : |Jan., 
not with the slightest expectation that the disease would take a 
favourable turn in the interval, or that the anticipated horrors of 
the operation would become less appalling by reflection upon them, 
but simply because it was so probable that the operation would be 
followed by a fatal issue, that I wished to prepare for death and 
what lies beyond it whilst my faculties were clear and my emotions 
comparatively undisturbed. ; 
“The week, so slow and yet so swift in its passage, at length 
came to an end, and the morning of the operation arrived. 
“Before the days of anzsthetics, a patient preparing for an 
operation was like a condemned criminal preparing for execution. 
He counted the days till the appointed day came. He counted the 
hours of that day until the appomted hour came. He listened for the 
echo, in the street, of the surgeon’s carriage. He watched for his 
pull at the door-bell; for his foot on the stairs; for his step in the 
room ; for the production of his dreaded instruments; for his few 
grave words, and his last preparations before beginning ; and then 
he surrendered his liberty, and, revolting at the necessity, sub- 
mitted to be held or bound, and helplessly gave himself up to the 
cruel knife. The excitement, disquiet, and exhaustion thus occa- 
sioned could not but greatly aggravate the evil effects of the 
operation upon a frame predisposed to magnify, not to repel, its 
severity. ‘To make a patient incognisant of the surgeon’s proceed- 
ings, and unable to recall the details of an operation, is assuredly to 
save him from much present and much future self-torture, and to 
eive him a much greater chance of recovery. “7? 
“The operation was a more tedious one than some involving 
much greater mutilation. It necessitated cruel cutting through 
inflamed and morbidly sensitive parts, and could not be despatched 
by a few swift strokes of the knife. ye ; 
“Of the agony it occasioned I will say little. Suffering so great 
as I underwent cannot be expressed in words, and thus fortunately 
cannot be recalled. The particular pangs are now forgotten; but 
the black whirlwind of emotion, the horror of great darkness, 
and the sense of desertion by God and man, bordering closely upon 
despair, which swept through my mind and overwhelmed my heart, 
I can never forget, however gladly I would do so. ; 
“During the operation, in spite of the pain it occasioned, my 
senses were preternaturally acute. . . . I watched all that the 
surgeons did with a fascinated intensity. I still recall with un- 
welcome vividness the spreading out of the imstruments; the 
twisting of the tourniquet; the first incision; the fingering of 
the sawed bone; the sponge pressed on the flap ; the tying of the 
blood-vessels ; the stitching of the skin; and the bloody dismem- 
-bered limb lying on the floor. | 
“These are not pleasant remembrances. For a long time they 
