February 22, 1918] 



SCIENCE 



181 



American people will reply: "Yes, by all 

 means. You will be recreant to humanity 

 and to your duty if you do not." 



Modern Surgery. — "Lister," in Howard 

 Marsh's fine phrase "opened the gates of 

 mercy to mankind." Pasteur and Lister 

 are the two greatest benefactors of the hu- 

 man race in the domain of medicine. I am 

 not siire but that I might even omit the last 

 five words. 



The revolution which Lister produced in 

 surgery is so well known to every intelli- 

 gent person that I need only say a few 

 words. Forty years ago a wholly new surg- 

 ical ei'a was inaugurated by Pasteur and 

 Lister. In the Civil War there were re- 

 corded 6i wounds of the stomach and only 

 one recovered. Otis estimated the mortal- 

 ity at 99 per cent. In over 650 cases of 

 wounds of the intestines there were only 

 fi\'e cases of recovery after wounds of the 

 small bowel and 59 from wounds of the 

 large bowel — tc^ether only 64 out of 650 

 recovered, i. e., over 90 out of eveiy 100 

 died! 



The complete statistics of the present 

 war can not be tabulated and published for 

 some years. I give, however, the result of 

 one series of abdominal gunshot wounds as 

 a contrast, on a far larger scale and in far 

 worse wounds. Out of 500 such operations. 

 245 recovered! and only 255 died! Con- 

 trast 51 per cent, of deaths in these wounds 

 with mutilation and infection unutterably 

 worse than in the Civil War, with 99 per 

 cent, of deaths, according to Otis. 



Is not this a triumph of bacteriological 

 and surgical research? Would you pro- 

 hibit similar researches now when your 

 boy's life may be saved by them? 



Is not this one of the things that liave 

 "ieen discovered" by vivisection and has 

 not such change in surgical treatment been 

 of "benefit to the human race"? In all 

 honesty would you be willing to have your 



son treated as I myself (may God forgive 

 me!) ignorantly treated hundreds during 

 the Civil War? 



This advance I do not think or believe, 

 but I KNOW is due to Pasteur and Lister 

 and their followers. I know it bj' personal 

 experience just as you know the high cost 

 of living, the shortage of sugar and the 

 scarcity of coal. 



The bacteriology which the antivivisec- 

 tionists scorn and reject I know is the cor- 

 nerstone of modern surgery. Before Lis- 

 ter's day out of 100 cases of compound 

 fracture 66 died from infection. Now less 

 than one out of 100 die. Before Lister my 

 old master in surgery, Dr. Washington L. 

 Atlee, one of the pioneers in practising 

 ovariotomj'^, lost two out of every 3 pa- 

 tients — now only two or three in a hundred 

 die. Before Lister we never dared to open 

 the head, the chest or the abdomen unless 

 they were already opened by the knife, the 

 bullet or other wounding body. Now we 

 open all of these great cavities freely and 

 do operations of which the great surgeons 

 of the past never dreamed in the wildest 

 flights of their imagination. Could they re- 

 turn to earth they would think us stark 

 crazy until they found that the mortailtj' 

 was almost negligible and the lives saved 

 numbered hundreds of thousands. 



I have given but a few instances of the 

 manj' wonderful benefits which have re- 

 sulted from medical research in every de- 

 partment of medicine. But I believe they 

 are sufficiently convincing. I can sjinpa- 

 thize with the deep feelings of those who 

 wish to spare pain to animals, but is it not 

 a higher and more imperative, a holier 

 sympathy that has spared and will spare 

 pain eventually to human beings and also 

 to other animals in uncounted numbers? 



Do you wonder that after over forty 

 years of steady practise, teaching and writ- 

 ing I assert, conscious of the great responsi- 



