846 



SCIENCE 



[N. S. Vol. XLI. No. 1067 



to order six ounces or a gallon of laudanum, an 

 ounce or two or a pound or two of opium, and I was 

 in utter darkness as to the mode of getting any of 

 the other things from a teaspoon to a cook. How- 

 ever, I inquired and as soon as I learned how, I 

 set myself to work. For two nights I slept only 

 about three hours each, and I had the satisfaction 

 of reporting to Dr. Letterman at the end of three 

 days, instead of five, that I was ready. On the 

 fourth day I had one hundred wounded men in 

 each hospital.2 



I congratulate you in this more enlight- 

 ened age and as students in this fine school 

 where you are trained and drilled in mat- 

 ters which we had to cope with in our 

 stumbling way, by dint of desperately hard 

 work, without guidance, often learning only 

 by our bitter mistakes. 



"We, the few surgeons still surviving those 

 momentous four years, may well say to you 

 Morituri salutamus. 



1 have been so very fortunate as to live 

 during the whole period of the greatest 

 revolution surgery has ever passed through. 

 How strange seem these words of Erichsen, 

 the then foremost London surgeon and 

 Lister's early chief at University College 

 Hospital uttered in 1874, just as surgery 

 was on the eve of its very greatest triumph. 



Surgery in its mechanical and manipulative 

 processes, in its art in fact, is approaching, if it 

 has not already attained to, something like finality 

 of perfeetion.3 



Anesthesia in 1846 and 1847 had robbed 

 operations of the terror of agonizing pain. 

 Quick, "slap-dash surgery" — a necessity 

 before the days of anesthesia — then gave 

 way to delicate, painstaking, artistic sur- 

 gery. Antiseptics thirty years later relieved 

 the patients from the terrors of death and 

 gave to the surgeon restful nights and 

 joyous days. 



Hence when I received the kind invita- 

 tion to address you it seemed to me that I 

 could possibly render you some service by 



2 Keen, "Addresses and Other Papers," 1905, 

 p. 424. 



3 "Wrench, "Lister's Life and Work," p. 2S1. 



describing the state of surgery "Before and 

 After Lister," since my testimony would 

 be that of an eye witness. 



When the Apostle Paul was about to be 

 bound and scourged you remember that he 

 claimed immunity as a Roman. "With a 

 great sum obtained I this freedom," ex- 

 plained the chief captain. "But I," said 

 the Apostle, with justifiable pride, "was 

 free born." "With a great sum" of the 

 most strenuous labor the men of my genera- 

 tion acquired the knowledge and the skill 

 and the immense satisfaction of the anti- 

 septic and aseptic era — but you, you are 

 "free born" and have entered into a right- 

 ful heritage from your fathers. "Before 

 Lister" and "After Lister" in the surgical 

 calendar are the equivalents of "b.c. " and 

 "a.d. " of our common chronology. 



Modern military surgery may be said to 

 begin with Ambroise Pare in the middle of 

 the sixteenth century. Gunpowder, though 

 long known, had been used in warfare to 

 any large extent for only a few decades. 

 The belief, shared fully by Pare himself, 

 that such wounds were "poisoned," was 

 universal. Treatment was directed to the 

 destruction of the supposed poison by pour- 

 ing boiling oil and hot pitch into such 

 wounds. In the heat of his anger at the 

 inhumanity of the new weapons he says in 

 his preface to Book XI., "Of wounds made 

 by gunshot and other fiery Engines and 

 all sorts of Weapons ' ' :* 



I think the deviser of this deadly Engin hath this 

 for his recompence that his name should be hidden 

 by the darkness of perpetual ignorance as not 

 meriting for this his most pernitious Invention 

 Any Mention from Posterity. 



Yet with a curious inconsistency he imme- 

 diately gives the name of a German monk 

 as the ' ' deviser. ' ' 



* ' ' The Works of that Famous Chirurgeon Am- 

 brose Parey, " translated by Th. Johnson, Lon- 

 don, 1678, p. 270. 



