128 



SCIENCE 



[N. S. Vol. LIII. No. 1363 



6. The discovery that insects carry disease 



(1889). 



7. The discovery of radio-activity and espe- 



cially for medical use, the X-rays (1895). 



8. The development of a medical literature 



written by American authors (1859- 

 1920). 



9. The founding of great laboratories of re- 



search. 



With the exception of the first, every one of 

 these wonderful, discoveries has occurred dur- 

 ing my own lifetime. 



The first research laboratory was founded in 

 1884 by Andrew Carnegie, in connection with 

 the Bellevue Hospital Medical College in New 

 York. Others, larger and more elaborate, soon 

 followed, usually in connection with other 

 medical schools. The greatest and most use- 

 ful of them all is the wonderful Rockefeller 

 Institute for Medical Research, an independ- 

 ent institution in New York City. From that 

 busy center has come one beneficent discovery 

 after another, the last being the discovery by 

 that remarkable genius, Hideyo Noguchi, of 

 the germ of yellow fever, and the preparation 

 of a vaccine which in case of exposure, has 

 proved to be not only a means of protecting 

 those who have never had an attack, but to be 

 actually curative of the fever if administered 

 very early. 



In my student days, practically all of our 

 important medical text books were of Euro- 

 pean, and especially of British origin. The 

 sole exception was the elder Gross's two-volume 

 Surgery (1859) and, twenty years later, Ag- 

 neVs Surgery in three volumes. Now, there 

 is hardly any department of medicine in which 

 there are not several American text-books of 

 great merit, and our medical journals rival 

 those of Europe. 



The first text-book of Surgery in the Eng- 

 lish language, founded upon bacteriology, the 

 corner stone of modern surgery, was the 

 " American Text-book of Surgery," which I 

 organized, and later, with the assistance of Dr. 

 J. "William White, as co-editor, and eleven 

 other American surgeons — published in 1892. 

 It passed through four large editions. I have 

 just finished a still larger work by about 100 



American and British authors in eight vol- 

 umes, averaging 1,000 pages each. It took 18 

 years of labor ere I could write " Finis " as 

 1921 was ushered in. 



Every , intelligent person knows of the ac- 

 tual revolution in surgery, medicine, obstet- 

 rics and all the specialties, which has taken 

 place of late years. Anesthesia has robbed 

 surgical operations of nearly all their pain. 

 Antiseptic, and later, aseptic methods, have 

 made the old operations safe, as shown by an 

 unparalleled diminution of the moi^tality. It 

 has made possible, also, a vast number of 

 operations which were absolutely prohibited in 

 the first twenty years of my professional life, 

 because of their fatality. "Noli me tangere" 

 was writ large on the head, the chest and the 

 abdomen. To-day, we invade these earlier 

 sacrosanct cavities with a free hand and with 

 glorious life-saving results. 



Medicine has progressed equally far. We 

 know the causes of various diseases, which we 

 were fighting in the dark until bacteriology re- 

 vealed to us the realm of the almost infinitely 

 little, but they put the multiplication table to 

 shame by the incredible rapidity of their 

 growth. It is Lilliput versus Gulliver. 

 ' Medical science, however, girded up its loins 

 in our laboratories of research and at the bed- 

 side, and resolutely attacked the enemy, and 

 has won victory after victory. We learned 

 soon not only the cause but the mode of trans- 

 mission of these various diseases, especially the 

 remarkable discovery that insects— the mos- 

 quito, the louse, the tick, the flea and the fly 

 — and some of the lower animals, especially the 

 dog and the rat, were the means of spreading 

 disease. 



The results of these combined discov- 

 eries are seen in the imminent banishment 

 from the whole earth of yellow fever, the 

 immense diminution of typhoid, tetanus, diph- 

 theria and other germ diseases, and the curb- 

 ing of tuberculosis and other diseases, barring, 

 of course, the results of the war. 

 ■ Maternity, which nature surely intended to 

 ■be a normal and a safe physiological event, 

 was very dangerous for years after I gradu- 

 ated. The usual death rate in the '60's and 



