But the limits of surgical progress were not yet reached. Let me quote
again from the address before alluded to:
“Even the introduction of anæsthesia, however, did not rid
surgery of all its terrors. The acute pain of the operation was
abolished, but the after-suffering, as I know only too well,
in my early surgical days, was something dreadful to see. The
parched lips of the poor sufferer, tossing uneasily during
sleepless nights; wounds reeking with pus, and patients dying by
scores from blood-poisoning, from erysipelas, from tetanus, from
gangrene, were only too familiar sights in the pre-antiseptic
days. Then, again, there arose one of these deliverers of the
human race whose name can never be forgotten and whose fame will
last so long as time shall endure. Jenner, Warren, and Lister
are a triumvirate of names of which any profession may well be
proud. Thank God, they all sprang from virile Anglo-Saxon loins!
No praise, no reward, no fame is too great for them. That Lord
Lister still lives to see the triumph of his marvellous services
to humanity is a joy to all of us. And when the profession arose
_en masse_, within the last few years, at the International
Congress of Berlin, and at the meeting of the British Medical
Association in Montreal, and welcomed him with cheer after cheer,
it was but a feeble expression of gratitude for benefits which no
words can express.
“Before Lister’s day erysipelas, tetanus, gangrene, and
blood-poisoning in its various phases were the constant
attendant of every surgeon. They were dreaded guests at almost
any operation; and when in rare cases we obtained primary union
without a drop of pus, without fever, and with but little
suffering, it was a marvellous achievement. Now it is precisely
reversed. The surgeon who does not get primary union without
a drop of pus, with no fever, and with little suffering, asks
himself—what was the fault in my technic? To open the head, the
abdomen, or the chest thirty years ago was almost equivalent to
signing the death-warrant of a patient. The early mortality of
ovariotomy was about sixty per cent.; two out of three died. Now
many a surgeon can point to a series of one hundred abdominal
operations with a fatality of only two or three per cent. When
Sir Spencer Wells recorded his first one thousand cases of
ovariotomy it was calculated that after deducting the years which
the patients who died from the operation would have lived had no
operation been done the net result of the thousand cases was an
addition of twenty thousand years to human life. One thousand
ovariotomies under antiseptic precautions at the present would
certainly add at least thirty thousand years to human life. Would
not such a guerdon be enough for any man?
“This, too, is a direct result of laborious laboratory
researches, beginning with the investigations of Liebig and
Pasteur on fermentation. Lister went still further. Even before
the discovery of the bacteria of suppuration, of tetanus, and
of erysipelas he showed us experimentally how, by surgical
cleanliness, we could avoid all infection and so banish these
pests from our hospitals and bring life and health to many who
otherwise would have perished from operations which are now
perfectly safe.
“The mortality of compound fractures in the pre-antiseptic days
was about sixty per cent. It was one of the most dreaded of
all accidents. Its mortality now is perhaps not over three per
cent., and the mortality from sepsis after such a fracture, in
the hands of well-instructed surgeons, is almost nil. Prior to
Lister’s day the mortality of major amputations varied from fifty
to sixty-three per cent. Now it is from ten to twenty per cent.
And so I might go on with operation after operation and show how
they have become so safe that one need not dread any, saving
exceptional cases.
“These two modern discoveries, anæsthesia and antisepsis, have
utterly revolutionized modern surgery. They have made possible
operations which, by reason of their length and pain and danger,
were utterly unjustifiable in former days, but are now the daily
occupation of a busy surgeon. And, far better than this, they
have enabled us to bring to homes and hearts, which otherwise
would have been broken up and wrung with sorrow, the comfort of
life restored to dear ones upon whom depended the happiness and
support of the families. Translate figures into happy hearts and
prosperous homes if you can, and then you can tell me what Warren
and Lister have done for humanity!”
The result of these two wonderful discoveries has been to separate us
from the surgical past, as by a great gulf.
“Great theologians, such as a Calvin or a Jonathan Edwards,
were they recalled to life, could discourse as learnedly as
ever of predestination and free will; great preachers, as
a Beecher or a Spurgeon, could stir our souls and warm our
hearts as of old; great jurists, as a Justinian or a Marshall,
could expound the same principles of law which hold good for
all time; great forensic orators, as a Burke or a Webster,
could convince us by the same arguments and arouse us by the
same invectives or the same eloquence that made our fathers
willing captives to their silver tongues. But to-day, so rapid
has been our surgical progress, a Velpeau, a Sir William
Ferguson, or a Pancoast, all of whom have died within the
last thirty years, could not teach modern surgical principles
nor perform a modern surgical operation. Even our every-day
surgical vocabulary—staphylococcus, streptococcus, infection,
immunity, antisepsis and asepsis, toxin and antitoxin—would be
unintelligible jargon to him; and our modern operations on the
brain, the chest, the abdomen, and the pelvis would make him
wonder whether we had not lost our senses, until, seeing the
almost uniform and almost painless recoveries, he would thank God
for the magnificent progress of the last half-century, which had
vouchsafed such magical, nay, such almost divine, power to the
modern surgeon.”