Within our own time, another great man of the Washington type,
Count Cavour, has been slain by medical bleeding precisely as
Washington was. The worse Cavour grew, the more his doctors
bled him, and he finally succumbed under the treatment, in the
flower of his age and in the midst of his usefulness. It is,
therefore, not unfair to conclude that the final cessation of
a practise so barbarous, so opposed to common sense, has been
due to the increase of physiological knowledge and to that
increased reliance on nature and careful nursing, and diminished
reliance on “physic,” which is the result of this knowledge,
and that its continuance in any country is simply a sign of a
low condition of medical research. The advance in conservative
surgery has been simply enormous. The great operations have been
robbed of their terrors, and with their terrors of much of their
danger, and nothing has made more progress than contrivances
for preventing the loss of blood. In fact, in the practise of
to-day there is nothing of which so much care is taken as of the
patient’s blood. Not only is he left in possession of all he has
already got, but every pains is taken to increase his supply
of it. Nobody “lets blood” now but assassins, and “toughs” and
suicides--a curious sign of progress, but a sign of progress it
is.--New York _Evening Post_.
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