ACHIEVEMENTS OF SURGERY 425 



part of a medical culture which is itself contemporaneous and 

 co-extensive with a general cultiu'e. The settlement of Amer- 

 ica was coincident with a revival of the arts and learning and 

 with the appearance of rational industries, the opening of a 

 world market, and the establishment of world wide unity in 

 every department of science and the arts. Harvey's discovery 

 of the circulation of the blood, with all its far reaching signif- 

 icance, Van Boerhaave's discovery of a new world of anatomy 

 through his compound microscope, and a host of discoveries 

 bearing the names of investigators with this new instrument, 

 Malpighi, Steno, AVirsung, Rudbeck, Bartholinis, Glisson, 

 Warton, Schneider, Peyer, Bruner, Bellini, Sylvius, Willis, 

 Highmore, Graaf, fired the imaginations of the medical world 

 and even lighted up the practice of surgery in the recently dis- 

 covered and sparsely settled new world. For a hundred years 

 or more the physicians of America were educated in the med- 

 ical schools of Scotland, England, France and Germany, where 

 these discoveries were taught first hand and with a vitality 

 and energy which the printed page rarely carries. 



It is impossible to even mention in an article of this sort 

 all the achievements and advances in surgery to which Amer- 

 ica can reasonably lay a claim. Much more difficult is it then 

 to credit the achievements of American surgery to the satis- 

 faction of all claimants, and no attempt will be made to do so. 

 Disputes exist over priorities between America and Europe 

 and between different sections or cities in America, not to men- 

 tion the differences betw^een surgeons in the same communit}^ 

 over claims to almost every important advancement or device. 

 It is interesting if not remarkable that when the psychological 

 moment w^as ripe for it a simultaneous operation or perfor- 

 mance, or a similar or identical invention or contrivance, was 

 accomplished by distant and unrelated surgeons. Each dec- 

 ade, therefore, advanced the borderland of surgery into the 

 unknown and untried along definite and limited fields. At a 

 particular period in the early nineteenth century the impulse 

 of Pere's great invention caused unusual attention to be given 

 to the ligature of arteries, and as opportunity presented itself 

 the ligation of each of the larger arterial trunks was hailed as 

 an adventure and a distinct achievement. Passing from a 



